Shirley Knight (#266) - April, 2010

During her month in the cast of the Off-Broadway comedy “Love, Loss and What I Wore”, Shirley Knight (1976 Tony Award winner for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for “Kennedy’s Children”) discusses the appeal of the "stool and music stand" style of presentation while pointing out that she had the only continuing narrative among the many interwoven stories. She also explains why she considers her every appearance on stage to be a rehearsal, not a performance; her attraction to the groundbreaking play “Dutchman” by LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), which she did in Los Angeles and on film; how she shifted from a planned career in music to acting and her trek out west to the Pasadena Playhouse to pursue that new goal; the extraordinary experience of appearing as Irina in “The Three Sisters” in her Broadway debut, with Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley as her siblings under the direction of Lee Strasberg -- and why she chose that role over playing Ophelia to Richard Burton's Hamlet; her years working in England, notably in plays by her husband John Hopkins, which she continued to perform upon their return to the U.S.; her memorable role in Robert Patrick's “Kennedy's Children”; what it was like to have Tennessee Williams write a role expressly for her in “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur”; her affinity for the plays of fellow Kansan William Inge and her role in creating the ongoing Inge Festival; and her affection for the work of Horton Foote, which marked her most recent Broadway appearance, in the Pulitzer-winning “The Young Man from Atlanta”.