Shirley Knight, an outspoken actress who soared to acclaim in her 20s with two Academy Award nominations and later won a Tony Award on Broadway and three Emmy Awards for her television roles, died April 22 at her daughter’s home in San Marcos, Tex. She was 83.
Miss Knight was an immediate success in Hollywood and was considered one of the most skilled actresses of her generation, with a particular talent for dramas about families on the edge.
Her Oscar nominations for best supporting actress came in the filmed versions of two Broadway plays, William Inge’s “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” (1960) and Tennessee Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1962).
In both films, she portrayed young, somewhat naive women caught up in the troubled, turbulent lives of those around her. During the making of “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” about a family turned upside down in 1920s Oklahoma, Miss Knight met the Kansas-born Inge on the movie set.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You look like you could be a girl from Kansas,’ and I said, ‘I am a girl from Kansas,’ ” she told the Topeka Capital-Journal in 2007. Several years earlier, she had been an extra in the 1955 film “Picnic,” written by Inge and shot on location a few miles from her hometown.
With her expressive eyes and understated style, Miss Knight seemed destined for stardom early in her career. She trained at New York’s Actors Studio and was part of a landmark 1964 stage production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters,” directed by Lee Strasberg.
She had major roles in several movies, including Sidney Lumet’s “The Group” (1966), about the lives of graduates of an elite women’s college, and Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Rain People” (1969), about a disillusioned housewife who leaves home to roam the country. She appeared in the incendiary off-Broadway racial drama “Dutchman,” written by Amiri Baraka, about a white woman who seduces a black man riding the subway, then starred in the 1966 film version of the play.
But Miss Knight had a penchant for speaking her mind, calling out famous actors she considered frauds and, essentially, burning every bridge that led to Hollywood.
“The Oscar nominations?” she told the New York Times in 1967. “Listen, they give Oscars to people like Charlton Heston. All the cliches about Hollywood are true. It’s silly to knock it, because it’s so obviously stupid. The movie business is run by blockheads.”
Miss Knight could have been a movie star on a grand scale, she said, but what she really wanted was to challenge her acting skills.
“I just hated it out there,” she said. “I was working with big names who didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain. I had no respect for anyone, least of all myself. I guess I just didn’t want to be Natalie Wood.”
Miss Knight lived in England for several years, working with top-notch stage actors and raising her children. When she returned to the United States, she increasingly took on demanding character-driven roles.
In the 1970s, when television networks carried live theatrical productions, she appeared in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Lie” on CBS’s “Playhouse 90” and in a 1974 NBC production of Clifford Odets’s “The Country Girl.”
“Acting is maybe being boring, or bitchy, or horrid,” she told the Times in 1974. “I play ordinary people, and I cannot stand these ‘stars’ who take real ordinary people and make them ‘interesting’ and call it acting. No real person behaves like Elizabeth Taylor, nobody talks like Katharine Hepburn.”
In 1975, Miss Knight was cast in the Broadway production of “Kennedy’s Children,” a play by Robert Patrick about the shattered ideals of people who came of age in the 1960s. She won a Tony Award for playing an actress, sliding toward alcoholism, who imagined herself as the next Marilyn Monroe.
“Miss Knight’s bitterness is reserved, shaped for irony; she chooses her words as carefully as Henry James might have done,” critic Walter Kerr wrote in the Times. “The performance is bold, deliberate and hypnotic.”
She was nominated for another Tony in 1997 for her performance in Horton Foote’s “The Young Man From Atlanta,” portraying a sad, simple woman who cannot admit that her son died by suicide.
Reportedly one of Tennessee Williams’s favorite actresses, Miss Knight often performed in regional theater productions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie.” In the 1970s, Williams wrote the one-act play “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur” as a vehicle for her.
Over time, Miss Knight slowly came to terms with Hollywood and took on dozens of film and TV roles, from “Barnaby Jones” and “Law & Order” to the 1997 movie “As Good as It Gets,” for which Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt won best-acting Oscars.
Miss Knight won an Emmy Award in 1987 for an appearance on “Thirtysomething,” then won two in 1995, for a one-time role on “NYPD Blue” and another for playing a woman convicted of abusing preschool children in “Indictment: The McMartin Trial.”
Shirley Enola Knight was born July 5, 1936, in Goessel, Kan., and completed high school in Lyons, Kan. Her father was an oil executive, her mother a homemaker.
Miss Knight learned to sing and play musical instruments as a child and studied opera and journalism at what is now Wichita State University. She attended a summer acting class in California and stayed on, winning theatrical roles and a contract from the Warner Bros. studio.
Her first marriage, to actor and producer Gene Persson, ended in divorce. Her second husband, British playwright and screenwriter John Hopkins, died in 1998.
Survivors include a daughter from her first marriage, Kaitlin Hopkins (who took her stepfather’s last name) of San Marcos; a daughter from her second marriage, Sophie Jacks of Thousand Oaks, Calif.; and a stepdaughter, Justine Hopkins of Bristol, England.
In later years, Miss Knight adapted easily to the wide-ranging roles that came her way. She founded an annual festival devoted to the works of Inge in her native Kansas.
She appeared in several plays, including Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba,” with her daughter Kaitlin, who heads the musical theater department at Texas State University in San Marcos.
From 2005 to 2007, Miss Knight had a recurring role in “Desperate Housewives,” and she played Kevin James’s mother in the 2009 movie comedy “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and its 2015 sequel. Her final starring film role was in 2013’s “Redwood Highway,” about an aging woman who walks 80 miles to the Oregon coastline in search of her past and a measure of independence.
“I started acting in 1958,” Miss Knight told the New York Post in 2005, “and I’ve never been out of work.
“If you’re an actress, the one thing you mustn’t do is tamper with your body and your face. When you do that, you sort of take yourself out of the game. I mean, bless her, but what roles can Elizabeth Taylor play except an older woman who’s had a facelift?
“My colleagues, like Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, we’re all working. And it has to do, on a very simple level, with acting our age.”
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