LOS ANGELES — Shirley Knight, the Kansas-born actress who was nominated for two Oscars early in her career and went on to play an astonishing variety of roles in movies, TV and the stage, has died. She was 83.
Knight passed away Wednesday at her daughter’s home in San Marcos, Texas, according to her daughter Kaitlin Hopkins.
Knight’s career carried her from Kansas to Hollywood and then to the New York theater and London and back to Hollywood. She was nominated for two Tonys, winning one. In recent years, she had a recurring role as Phyllis Van de Kamp (the mother-in-law of Marcia Cross’ character) in the long-running ABC show “Desperate Housewives,” gaining one of her many Emmy nominations.
Knight’s her first Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress came in just her second screen role, in the 1960 film “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.”
She was nominated for best supporting actress two years later for her role in the 1962 film “Sweet Bird of Youth.”
Her beauty helped bring her roles in such films as “The Group” (1966), and “Dutchman” (1967). After playing a pregnant woman who runs off with a football player in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Rain People,” released in 1969, she wearied of the Hollywood routine.
She returned to films in “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.” She also appeared in such films as “Endless Love”, “As Good as It Gets” (as Helen Hunt’s mother) and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”
She won a Tony award in 1976 as best featured actress in a play for “Kennedy’s Children.”
Knight became active in television starting in the ’80s and was nominated for Emmys eight times from 1981 to 2006. She won a guest actress Emmy in 1988 for playing Mel Harris’ mother in “Thirtysomething,” and then won two Emmys in the same year, 1995: one for a supporting actress role in the TV drama “Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” and a second for a guest actress role as a murder victim in “NYPD Blue.”
