Lee Grant has acted and directed in both film and television. As a teenager, she won The Critics' Circle Award for her role in the play, Detective Story, then reprised the role on film, earning a Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the first of three Oscar nominations.
After being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, she resumed her acting career in the television series, Peyton Place, for which she won an Emmy. She won another Emmy for her role in The Neon Ceiling and five additional acting Emmy nominations. In 1976, she garnered her first Oscar for her role in Shampoo and received subsequent Academy Award nominations for her work in The Landlord, and Voyage of the Damned. Since 1980, Grant has concentrated on directing. Her adaptation of Strindberg's The Stronger was selected as one of the ten best films produced for AFI. In 1983, Grant received the Congressional Arts Caucus Award for Outstanding Achievement in Acting and Independent Filmmaking. She directed the movie for television, Nobody’s Child in 1986, for which she received the DGA Award. In 1987, she was awarded an Oscar for her HBO documentary, Down and Out in America. Most recently she directed the Lifetime series Intimate Portrait and the HBO documentary A Father...A Son...Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.