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Shirley Knight
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Shirley Enola Knight (born July 5 1936, Goessel, Kansas) is an American actress who made her film debut in 1959. The following year she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and again, in 1962, for her role as Paul Newman's sweetheart in Sweet Bird of Youth.
She appeared in The Group (1964) and Petulia (1967). She also starred in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969).
In the
1960s she abandoned Hollywood in favor of the
Broadway stage, but she has since returned to film as
Helen Hunt's mother in
As Good As It Gets, and to television in a number of programs, including as
Faith Ford's mother in Ford's failed sitcom Maggie Winters, and on series such as
Murder, She Wrote,
Law & Order,
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and
Desperate Housewives as
Bree Van De Kamp's mother-in-law Phyllis Van De Kamp.
She has two daughters,
Kaitlin Hopkins and
Sophie Hopkins, by two different marriages, both are also actors. Sophie is daughter of the writer
John Hopkins.
Selected filmography
