Over the past forty years Lee Grant has forged a career as diverse and accomplished as almost anyone working in the entertainment industry. An acclaimed actress on stage, film and television, she is also a prolific director of documentaries, feature films and television movies about a wide variety of subjects. Her work as a director is especially distinguished by her passionate advocacy for issues of concem to woman, as is movingly evidenced by her most recent film, Say It, Fight It, Cure It about the lives of women afflicted with breast cancer.

Lee Grant is the quintessential independent director, approaching each subject she films from a personal point of view-with intimacy, commitment, and a no-holds-barred frankness-that is as refreshing as it is revelatory.

Daughter of an actress-model, Lee Grant made her stage debut at age four in a Metropolitan Opera production. At 11 she became a member of the American Ballet and at 14, after graduating from high school, won a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse. Sidney Kingsley spotted her in a showcase production and cast her in the ingenue role of a shoplifter in "Detective Story" (1949) on Broadway. She won the Critics Circle Award for her performance. In 1951, she repeated the role in the film version, was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Immediately after this spectacular screen debut, she became a victim of the McCarthy-era Red Scare machine. She was blacklisted simply because her then-husband, the late playwright Arnold Manoff, had been on the blacklist and she refused to testify against him before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Except for occasional parts, she couldn't find work in films or on TV for the next 12 years.

However, she continued to appear on stage- winning an Obie Award for her performance in Jean Genet's "The Maids," playing Sophocles for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, and starring in "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" on Broadway, among numerous other roles-and in the '60s returnee to the screen in a variety of memorable leads and character parts.

Following impressive performances in Valley of the Dolls (1966) and In the Heat of the Night (1967), she won the best supporting actress Academy Award for Shampoo (1975), sandwiched between two additional Oscar nominations, for The Landlord (1970) and Voyage of the Damned (1976). Other highlights from her illustrious career as an actor include memorable performances in Damien Omen II (1978), Visiting Hours (1981), Teachers (1984), Defending Your Life (1991), and The Substance of Fire (1996).

She has also made frequeent tlelvision appearnces, and won an Emmy Award in 1966 for her performance in "Peyton Place" and in 1971 for the drama "Neon Ceiling". More recently , she appeared to great acclaim in "Something To Live For: The Alison Gertz Story" (1992) and "Citizen Cohn" (1992), produced by Doro Bacharach, a juror at this year's HIFF.

Having directed sporadically for the stage and TV, she has increasingly concentrated on filmmaking since the late 70's. Her first feature film, the critically acclaimed Tell Me A Riddle (1980), was followed by The Wilmar 8, a documentary; A Matter of Sex, a television movie for NBC, and five documentaries for HBO - Women on Trial, When Women Kill, What Sex Am I?, Battered: Down and Out in America, an expose on mass poverty, which won the Academy Award for Best Feature0Length Documentary in 1986; Nobody's Child (1986), for which she received the Directors Guild Award; Staying Together (1989), starring Christine Lahti and Jeff Daniels, which won the FIPA D'Argent at the Cannes International Television Festival.