Shirley Knight

Born on July 5, 1936, in Goessel, a small town in Kansas, Shirley Enola Knight was the daughter of a housewife and an oil company executive. She endowed with a privileged voice, her first intention was to become an opera singer, so she studied singing since she was eleven years old. But she realized that acting was her thing, after attending a performance by a company that had come to her town on tour. After graduating from high school, she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and studied acting at the Pasadena Theater School, an institution from which other Hollywood greats emerged.

In 1959, Shirley Knight went to New York, determined to succeed in the world of acting. There she signed up for the famous Actor’s Studio and she received classes from Lee Strasberg himself . She debuted on the stage, with the American production of the work “Looking Back in Anger”, by the British John Osborne . Subsequently, Ella Knight appeared in various television series and signed an exclusive contract with Warner.

She began to receive critical acclaim for her intense performance, as a young woman from Oklahoma in love with a Jew in Delbert Mann ‘s drama On the Dark Staircase , adapted from a play by William Inge . For the film she earned her first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She did not let a long time pass, two years, until she got her second, in the same category, for her role as a girl seduced and abandoned by Paul Newman ‘s character , in Sweet Bird of Youth .

Shirley Knight ended the 1960s by lavishing a lot on the theater, constantly appearing on television, and playing roles in films like Dutchman , Petulia , and above all It Rains on My Heart , by Francis Ford Coppola , perhaps her best-remembered role, where It was a woman who leaves her husband, after discovering that she has become pregnant, and ends up caring for a former soccer player who has suffered a brain injury.

Divorced from actor Eugene Persson, Shirley Knight married English playwright John Hopkins , and retired from cinema for five years. She returned with the thriller The Riddle Is Called the Juggernaut and played a family mom in Endless Love . She never left the theater, and won a Tony Award for “Kennedy’s Children.”

A tireless worker, she remained very active until an advanced age, specializing in mothering roles. Younger viewers will remember Shirley Knight for her impressive role as the mother of Helen Hunt ‘s character , in As Good As It Gets , and for her appearance in Desperate Housewives , where she was Phyllis, mother of Bree Van De’s first husband. Kamp. In The Private Life of Pippa Lee she has Keanu Reeves as a son , and she is the neighbor of the protagonist, to which the title alludes. If she was so good in this type of role, it was possibly because she was also a mother in real life, since she had two daughters, one from each husband, the actress Kaitlin Hopkins and the screenwriter Sophie C. Hopkins.