Shirley Knight of Kansas made her television debut in October, 1957 on NBC's "Matinee Theater" playing an unwed mother. Since then she's moved on to bigger and better suffering.
One Sunday evening about two years ago, Shirley protested throughout a "G.E. Theater" show that she did not want to be given to the Indians. (Ronald Reagan finally rescued her.) The following Thursday, she mourned her husband's untimely demise on "Playhouse 90." This season, Shirley has had her troubles on "Johny Staccato" (making arrangements to sell her child on the adoption black market, then regretting it) and on "Hawaiian Eye" (playing a beachcomber in one show, the wife of a wife-deserter in another).
To some, the melancholy events may have the ring of a fate much worse than living pleasantly in Kansas. But not to our heroine. "There's no place to act in Kansas," she says. "You're supressed. It makes you want to get out and do things." Shirley got out and started doing things- "Matinee Theater," then "Look Back in Anger" at a Los Angeles little theater; "Cheyenne" and "Buckskin" later on TV. With a degree in English literature from the University of Wichita, she had headed West to accept a fellowship and a job as an instructor at UCLA. But she changed her mind, enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse and moved into the Studio Club with 95 other actresses.

Shirley was 23 years old last Fourth of July. The daughter of an oilman, she was born in Goessel, Kan. "We were on our way to visit some relatives in Nebraska," she relates, "when I overtook my mother in Goessel. We lived there just long enough for me to be born, and I grew up near Lyons." Even as a stay-at-home, Shirley distinguished herself by placing second in a statewide talent contest staged by Horace Heidt's orchestra over the radio from Witchita. (Her sister Gloria, then six, won first place with 'Slow Boat to China.") Shirley also is the author of a short story "A Realization at a Funeral," published in a national magazine when she was 14.

Today Shirley has left the Studio club, as well as Kansas, behind her and shares a house in Westwood with her husband, Gene Personn, a television writer, producer and former actor, whom she married March 14, 1959. She is under contract to Warner Brothers for movies and TV--and plans, she says, to 'work ever day they'll let me until I'm 65."

Photo accompanying the article: Full page color of blond Shirley with sly smile looking at camera, head and shoulders only.