Lee Grant

People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.

The best actors just stay in the moment,and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what's going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don't know if you're going to survive.

I was such a Jewish princess. My whole life was leading up to marrying a rich man and living on 48th Street.

I don't think I fit the Marilyn Maxwell mode.

My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.

Film and television were out. I was 24, and it went on until I was 36. For an actor, those are your years. I got a great urgency and education during the blacklist, and it made me grow up in a way I never could have before, and in very good ways, too.

This is our lives. The way to give it dignity is to tell the truth.

When I was on stage in the '50s, it was a glory time, a golden time with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. There was real talent. And now, the theater is a little Disney-fied.

A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer's name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.

First of all, the leads aren't the kind of acting work that I like. The parts that are meatier are not the ones that have to have a romance.