Hollywood nepotism is real. Oh, not all the people with the same last name that we’ve covered are in any way related—between the two columns, we’ve covered six women with the last name of Davis, ranging from Ann B. to Viola, for example. Still, there have been any number of times when we’ve had to go out of our way to get to the famous parent before the famous child, and other people have had parents who were interesting but not quite worth writing about before their considerably more famous child. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising to discover that Lee Strasberg’s daughter not only went into acting but basically stepped into a fairly enviable career. Still, she wasn’t without talent, which is also perhaps not surprising.
She was the eldest of Lee Strasberg’s four children. She made her stage debut off-Broadway at age fourteen; the same year, she started on television. The next year, she was one of the few people to play Juliet at anything approaching the canonical age of the character. (Note that I’m okay with juliet’s not being twelve, but she should definitely be a teenager for the plot to work.) The year after that, she made her film debut playing Kim Novak’s younger sister. This is a career that any teenage actress of the day would love to have.
In 1955, Strasberg was cast as Anne Frank for the original Broadway run of The Diary of Anne Frank. It is, quite frankly, a grueling role for an actress, and the show ran 717 performances. She did not even screen test for the movie, which became the debut role for Millie Perkins. No one quite knows why. The assumption was that it was a decision on the part of director George Stevens, and maybe it was, but there seems to have been no documentation of that, or at least no documentation has ever been released. As it was, Strasberg continued on Broadway and continued to be successful there.
Strasberg had a steady career for years. She made the decision to move to Italy, a place where, presumably, her father had less influence, so she could have a career fully based on her own merits. She continued on the stage, and she did a few movies while she was in Europe. Then, she returned to the US and mostly worked in television for years. Through the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s, she had a Standard TV Actor Career—McMillan & Wife, a whole slew of Westerns, two episodes of The Rockford Files, and an episode of The Love Boat, among others. She said that, if she didn’t test herself, she wasn’t shaming her father, which . . . is a lot.
Strasberg was friends with Richard Burton and Marilyn Monroe. She was the daughter of two extremely influential people in the industry—though it’s worth noting that she herself scoffed at the idea of “method acting.” She’d been nominated for a Tony at eighteen. She spent years providing solid performances, if uninspired ones. And even she had to deal with the traditional Hollywood distaste for middle-aged actresses. She ended up writing a book at least in part about it, because she just couldn’t take it anymore.
I can’t fall back on nepotism; I rely on the kind folks who support my Patreon and Ko-fi!
