In this wonderful memoir, actor Grant charts her life from a childhood in New York City through her performance in Shampoo and beyond. Grant tells endlessly delightful tales of costars and friends such as Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Sidney Poitier, and writes with the verve and candor befitting such a seductive and beloved star. Set amid the New York theater scene of the fifties and the star-studded parties of Malibu in the seventies, I Said Yes to Everything evokes a world of political passion and movie-star glamour. With courage and style, Grant rebuilt her life on her own terms: first stop, a starring role on Peyton Place, and then leads in Valley of the Dolls, In the Heat of the Night, and Shampoo, for which she won her first Oscar. And after twelve years of fighting the blacklist, she was finally exonerated. She met a man ten years her junior and began a wild, liberating fling that she never expected would last a lifetime.

She threw herself into work, accepting every theater or teaching job that came her way. Her name landed on the Hollywood blacklist, her offers for film and television roles ground to a halt, and her marriage fell apart.įinding reserves of strength she didn’t know she had, Grant took action against anti-Communist witch hunts in the arts. Born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal in New York City, actress Lee Grant spent her youth accumulating more experiences than most people have in a lifetime: from student at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse to member of the legendary Actors Studio from celebrated Broadway star to Vogue “It Girl.” At age twenty-four, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Detective Story, and a year later found herself married and a mother for the first time, her career on the rise.

I Said Yes to Everything by Lee Grant