Shirley Knight death: Oscar-nominated actor who starred in ‘The Dark at the Top of the Stairs’ dies aged 83

Shirley Knight, the actor whose work in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Sweet Bird of Youth earned her two Oscar nominations, has died at the age of 83.

Her daughter Kaitlin Hopkins announced the death on Wednesday on social media. Knight passed away on Wednesday in San Marcos, Texas.

Born in Kansas, Knight played an astonishing variety of roles in movies, TV and the stage as her career carried her to Hollywood, then to New York theatre 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 first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress came in just her second screen role, as an Oklahoman in love with a Jewish man in the 1960 film version of William Inge’s play The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs.

She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress again two years later for her role as the woman seduced and abandoned by Paul Newman in the 1962 film Sweet Bird Of Youth, based on the Tennessee Williams play.

As success beckoned in 1960, she told columnist Hedda Hopper that she was struggling to keep on an even keel and keep bettering herself as an actress.

“So many actors, once they became famous, lose some beautiful inner thing, something they should try hard to keep,” she said. “They begin to think too highly of themselves and success.”

For a time, she lived in New York, where she studied with Lee Strasberg. She turned down an offer to play Ophelia to Richard Burton’s Hamlet, preferring to appear on Broadway in 1964 with Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, a play directed by Strasberg.

Knight also had roles in films such as The Group (1966), based on Mary McCarthy’s novel about the lives of a group of college girls, and Dutchman (1967), from Amiri Baraka’s explosive one-act play.

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.

Knight moved to England with her second husband, British playwright John Hopkins, with whom she had a daughter, Sophie. Her first husband was producer Gene Persson, father of her older daughter, Kaitlin.

Over the next few years, she raised her daughters and did needlework. But “I decided that acting is what I do best”, she said. The family moved back to the US and she returned to films in Beyond The Poseidon Adventure.

She also appeared in such films as Endless Love (as Brooke Shields’ mother), As Good As It Gets (as Helen Hunt’s mother) and Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Meanwhile, she thrived on stage and television. She won a Tony award in 1976 as Best Featured Actress in a Play for Kennedy’s Children. Knight played, in the words of The New York Times review, “a very tart tart with an ambition of gold”.

She was nominated for another Tony in 1997 for Best Actress in Horton Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta. As the Times put it, “the splendid Ms Knight, who doesn’t waste a single fluttery gesture, brings an Ibsenesque weight to a woman frozen in the role of petulant, spoiled child bride”.

Knight became active in television starting in the Eighties 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.

The Associated Press contributed to this report