The Grayson Hall Centennial

Born 100 years ago today: Oscar nominated actress Grayson Hall (Shirley Grossman, 1922-85). Hall’s bug-eyed intensity served her well over a 30 year career in projects ranging from the avant-garde to the mainstream, from Off-Off-Broadway and Greenwich Village, to Broadway, and Hollywood. She was often cast as lesbians (real or implied), though she was married to TV writer Sam Hall, with whom she often worked on the same shows.

Hall was born and raised in Philadelphia; her mother had been in the Yiddish theatre. She began acting professionally in 1942; things began to hum more quickly about a decade later when she alternated roles in live TV dramas with parts in Off-Broadway productions of plays like Six Characters in Search of an Author and the U.S. Premiere of Genet’s The Balcony, in which she took over the role of The Madam from Nancy Marchand. Her first film was the low-budget indie Run Across the River (1961), shot and set in Greenwich Village. This was followed by the sexploitation classics Satan in High Heels(1962) and The Parisienne and the Prudes (1964).

These films brought her to the attention of John Huston, who cast her as the lesbian gym coach in Night of the Iguana (1964), which earned her that Oscar nom and elevated her to the mainstream, sort of. A supporting role in Disney’sThat Darn Cat (1965) was followed by a larger role in the French fashion satire Who Are You Polly Magoo (1966) directed by American expat William Klein, who we eulogized here. After appearing in a couple of episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Hall was cast in the role she may be best known for, that of Julia Collins on Dark Shadows (pictured above), which she played from 1967 to 1971. Her husband Sam also wrote for the show.

Post Dark Shadows, Hall continued in many of the same kinds of offbeat projects that had ever been her mainstay. She was in Michael Douglas’s first film Adam at Six A.M. (1970) along with Louise Latham. She was in the horror film Gargoyles (1972) with Cornel Wilde and Jennifer Salt, and The Great Ice Rip Off (1974), directed by Dark Shadows’ Dan Curtis. She was in the 1977 Broadway premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Happy End, translated by Michael Feingold (billed over newcomers Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd), and appeared opposite Derek Jacobi in The Suicide (1980), which had been developed by Adrian Hall (no relation) at Trinity Rep. Off-Broadway she was in Giradoux’s TheMadwoman of Chaillot with Geraldine Page in 1985.

Lung cancer took Grayson Hall at age 62; it won’t surprise those who saw her onscreen to hear that she was a heavy smoker. Oh, to be a vampire, and never have to die!