Two daughters: Kaitlin Hopkins and Sophie C. Hopkins
A lovely, talented, highly promising film ingenue in the early 60s, Shirley was very vocal about her dissatisfaction with the Hollywood scene and abandoned potential film stardom for Broadway roles. She later moved to England and thrived on the London stage for a number of years before returning to Hollywood as a plus-sized character support.
Appeared in the L.A. stage and British film version of Dutchman (1967), a racial drama, which was produced by her then-husband Eugene Persson. She won the Venice Film Festival award for her cinematic performance.
She refused the play "Kennedy's Children" by Robert Patrick in London, but accepted it in New York. At first rehearsal she began to read the role she'd been offered in England (a drab schoolteacher), and was astonished to learn that she was instead wanted for another lead (a glamorous actress), for which she won a "Tony" award.
Mother-in-law of Daniel Passer.
Won Broadway's 1976 Tony Award as Best Actress (Featured Role - Play) for "Kennedy's Children." She was also nominated in 1997 as Best Actress (Play) for "The Young Man from Atlanta."
Shirley Knight Detailed Biography
Shirley Knight was most recently seen with Jennifer Lopez in Angel Eyes. In 2000 she starred in the family ensemble drama 75 Degrees in July, which premiered at the Montreal International Film Festival.
Knight's early films include The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Sweet Bird of Youth for which she received Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress. For her starring performance in Dutchman, she won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Critic's Prize at Cannes. Other early films include The Group, Petulia, Endless Love and The Rain People, in a role written for her by director Francis Ford Coppola. More recent features include Stuart Saves His Family, Little Boy Blue, Diabolique and the acclaimed As Good as it Gets.
Also active in television, Knight has appeared in numerous mini-series and made-for-television films. She has received three Emmy Awards and has been nominated nine times. For her work in Indictment: The McMartin Trial, she received a Golden Globe and an Emmy Award. Other television work includes A Marriage of Convenience, The Country Girl, Ingmar Bergman's The Lie, The Wedding, If These Walls Could Talk and Playing for Time, as well as roles in such popular series as thirtysomething, Law and Order, N.Y.P.D. Blue, The Equalizer and The Fugitive.
Knight recently starred on Broadway in Horton Foote's The Young Man From Atlanta, for which she was nominated for the Tony and the Drama Desk Award. She won the Tony Award for her performance in Kennedy's Children. Among her memorable stage appearances are John Hopkins' Losing Time, The Cherry Orchard, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (written for her by Tennessee Williams) as well as the Lee Strasberg production of The Three Sisters. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance in John Guare's Landscape of the Body. More recently, Knight's Off-Broadway appearances include Necessary Targets and The Vagina Monologues.Knight can currently be seen in the thriller The Salton Sea with Val Kilmer, and next in The House on the Hill, P.S. Your Cat is Dead and the Showtime film My Louisiana Sky.
