Shirley Knight

I absolutely adore her. She never became a huge star, but she's one of those actresses who always puts a lot of effort into every performance.

This interview with her is pretty terrible (the guy apparently did zero research beforehand), but she's lovely.

http://chataboutit.com/the-barry-z-show-podcast-episode-52/

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She is in The Group, one of my favorite movies from the 60s!

She's good in Sweet Bird of Youth and The Group, but I think her best film performance might be The Rain People.

I think she's been in something like 200 theater productions. I would have loved to have seen her Blanche.



"There's no one Hamlet, there's no one ... Lady Macbeth, there's no one Blanche DuBois," says director Michael Kahn.

Kahn, artistic director at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company and former head of the Juilliard School's drama program, staged a production of Streetcar at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., in the 1970s. And he knew Tennessee Williams.

"Every Blanche who played it that Tennessee saw, he would tell them that they were his favorite Blanche," Kahn says. "Because each actress brought something different to the role than somebody else, and I think he liked that."

Glenn Close played Stella in Kahn's production. Playing Blanche was stage and screen veteran Shirley Knight — Oscar-nominated for her performance opposite Paul Newman in the film of Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, and familiar to contemporary pop-culture fans as Bree Van de Kamp's poisonous mother-in-law on Desperate Housewives.

Knight tackled Blanche again a few years after Kahn's Streetcar because she felt she hadn't finished with the character. The second time, Knight says, she came to a new understanding of the energy Blanche brings with her from the moment she appears.

"She is, from the onset, a moth that is fluttering too near to the flame," Knight says. "And she never stops."

It's important, Knight says, to capture that mothlike quality — to show how truly vulnerable Blanche is. Otherwise, Knight says, the audience can easily see Blanche as self-centered and manipulative. If an actress gets Blanche right, the audience will identify with her.

"Because we all are sometimes insecure, or petty," Knight says. "Looking down on other people … wanting safet—— and Blanche was searching for safety, and she never had it."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87859194

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Absolutely phenomenal and so underrated as an actress. Have to agree with MrMidwest that her performance in Coppola's THE RAIN PEOPLE was extraordinary. It's available for download for purchase or digital download over at the Warner Bros. Archives.

I also loved her as 'Heavenly' in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, her "one on one" with Ed Begley is one of my favorite scenes, but butchering of text aside (and in those days what Tennessee Williams adaptation wasn't butchered by the censors?), that whole film is a virtual master class in terrific acting.

THE GROUP...not so much. The intention was there but it comes off as just so much soap opera disguised as serious drama. Not as campy as VALLEY OF THE DOLLS but it's darn close and although Knight is good in this the movie is virtually usurped by Jessica Walter.

Updated On: 4/30/10 at 09:33 AM

I love her TV work as well, especially "Playing for Time" and especially especially "Indictment: The McMartin Trial" for which she won an Emmy.

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Updated On: 4/30/10 at 11:26 AM