Susannah Grant

SUSANNAH GRANT

Date of Birth: January 4, 1963

Born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, Susannah Grant is one of four children born to her schoolteacher mother and doctor father. She attended Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut before graduating from Amherst College with a degree in English.

After college, Grant moved to New York City, where she tried to get into acting and dabbled in journalism, including working as a fact checker at Rolling Stone magazine. After four years, she'd grown tired of New York and moved to San Francisco, where she landed a job at KPIX-TV.

The job didn't require much effort and left her sometimes with as much as six hours a day to occupy herself, so she began writing a screenplay, and found that she really enjoyed it. Grant moved to Los Angeles, where she was admitted to the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies screenwriting program.

In 1992, Grant won the Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting, awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The award gave her career a boost, and by 1995, she was working as a writer-producer-director on the series Party of Five, which went on to win a Golden Globe for best TV drama.

She jumped into film as a co-writer on the animated feature Pocahontas (1995). It was good training for the young writer-each scene had to be rewritten up to thirty times. Next came Ever After (1998), starring Drew Barrymore as a feisty young 16th-century woman. Beautifully written, filmed, acted and directed, it was well-received and earned Grant much deserved acclaim.

Grant's first solo effort was 28 Days (2000), a light-hearted drama starring Sandra Bullock as an alcoholic reluctant to admit her problem. But it was for her next film, Erin Brockovich (2000), starring Julia Roberts, that Grant received Academy Award, Writers Guild and BAFTA nominations for best original screenplay.

It was five years before Grant's next screenplay made it to theaters-In Her Shoes (2005), starring Cameron Diaz. Unfortunately, the chick flick wound up being her least successful film to date. She had more luck with Charlotte's Web (2006), starring Dakota Fanning. The film was well-received by critics and moviegoers alike.

Grant made her film directing debut with her screenplay, Catch and Release (2007), starring Jennifer Garner.

Filmography:

Catch and Release (2007)