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Born to a well-to-do Massachusetts family, Tammy Grimes studied drama at Stephens College in Missouri (where one of her instructors was George C. Scott) and New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. Grimes made her off-Broadway debut in the 1956 production The Littlest Revue. In 1959, she won a Theatre World Award for her performance in Look After Lulu; the following year, she graduated to full stardom in the long-running musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown, for which she won the first of her two Tony Awards. She rapidly became typed as a flamboyant, plummy-voiced "kook," a characterization that worked just fine on stage but did not adapt so easily to the more intimate medium of film. Perhaps as a result, Grime's film appearances have been few and far between. In 1966, she starred on the TV sitcom The Tammy Grimes Show, which was axed after three episodes; to clear herself for this assignment, she'd turned down the role of Samantha on Bewitched, which lasted eight seasons. From 1956 through 1960, Tammy Grimes was married to actor Christopher Plummer; their daughter, Amanda Plummer, is an excellent stage and film actress in her own right.