Biography: Tammy Grimes was born on January 30, 1934 in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Luther Nichols Grimes and Eola Niles Willard. Her father was a hotel and club manager, and moved young Tammy and his family to Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Boston to become the manager of the Brookline Country Club. Tammy has an older sister (married) named Nancy Lou and a younger brother named Luther Nichols Grimes, Jr., who graduated from Harvard. Tammy, whose name is Scotttish, graduated from Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Massachussets, where she was named 'the most picturesque young lady ever to enroll there'. Tammy's childhood idols were her father, Napoleon, Andrew Jackson, Manolete the bullfighter and Marlon Brando. She frequently went to movies during her childhood and adolescence, her favorites were Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney, and by the age of 13 she had decided to be an actress. At Beaver Country Day School she had a role as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina, and generated laughter at her entrance. By the age of 16 she acted as Sabina, the maid in The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder. This performance was witnessed by the playwright himself, and he said to her, "Young lady, even Tallulah Bankhead didn't do the things you did to the role." Tammy found that she enjoyed making people laugh, and that she could become a comedienne. She graduated from Beaver Country Day School in 1951.

Just before entering college, Tammy barely missed becoming a free-style swimmer for the 1952 United States Olympic team. She made her social debut at the Brookline Country Club in 1951, then she enrolled in college at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. which had a 2 year curiculum and a good drama department, and "a jewel box of a theater". She had decided she didn't want to follow the pattern of most young ladies at college who went there to get married and settle down in a suburb. She majored in English, read a great deal, and appeared in a new play every three weeks or so. She took starring roles in Born Yesterday and The Importance of Being Earnest. She was fascinated by the movie The Foxes of Harrow, and watched it ten times. During the summer of 1952 , she was an apprentice actress at the Falmouth Playhouse in Massachusetts, working on stage and then back stage. In 1953, she graduated with honors from Stephens Junior College , and by 1954 she was part of the staff of the Westport Playhouse in Connecticut, but when she gave away $500 worth of tickets at the box office, she was removed from that position. On one instance, Apprentice Night, she was given a chance to exhibit her acting talent, but during one break, she didn't have enough time to get into her costume and came out on stage in nothing but an old raccoon coat. After graduation, she moved to New York and studied acting as a member of Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and when she made her debut there in May, 1955, she appeared as Eshtemoa, a leading citizen, in Jonah and the Whale. Tammy won critical approval in the off-Broadway hilarious review Phenix '55, and she served as a stand-by for Kim Stanley in William Inge's Bus Stop, played the role several times.That year she impressed Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who gave her the role of Adele in her play The Amazing Adele, which unfortunately failed during its Philadelphia tryout that December of 1955, and closed in Boston on January 21, 1956. She toured with the road company of The Lark, with Julie Harris, playing the mistress of the Dauphin. She appeared off Broadway with ten young people in The Littlest Revue. Tammy then joined the cast of Clerambard at the off-Broadway Rooftop Theater, and in November, 1957 she got good notices from several New York critics, and was noticed by the night club impresario Julius Monk. Clerambard closed in the spring of 1958 and she spent several seasons at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, where she acted in King Henry IV, Part One, and in The Winter's Tale.

While looking for acting work, Tammy worked at various night clubs, singing and performing, especially for Julius Monk at his New York supper club, Downstairs at the Upstairs. She generated such excitement at her first supper club appearance in New York, that after Noel Coward heard her sing 18 Cole Porter songs, he auditioned her for ten minutes and then signed her to star in Look After Lulu on Broadway, as Lulu at the Henry Miller Theatre. The play only lasted 38 performances, closing in April, 1959, but the critics had kind things to say about Tammy's performance. From there, she appeared in Twelth Night at the Cambridge, Mass. Drama Festival, and then in Marc Blitzstein's opera, The Cradle Will Rock, which was revived at the New York City Center, that Feb., 1960, playing the part of Moll. She became a major star by appearing on Broadway in the starring role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown for which she won the Tony Award for Best Musical Comedy Actress. Tammy says that she won the role by singing 'Melancholy Baby' at her audition, and her amazing energy in the role of Molly kept the production going for two years on Broadway and on the road. Walter Kerr, the Drama Critic for the New York Times proclaimed "Tammy Grimes is a genius!", and ten years later he said "Miss Grimes remains a miracle." Ben Bagley, the Broadway impressario said of her on the LP album Ben Bagley's Vernon Duke Revisited: "Tammy Grimes is an extremely luscious lady- possibly the most glamorous woman in show business today. A face that suggests both Harlow and Garbo. The legs of a Dietrich, combined with the knowing wit of a Dorothy Parker, and she smells good. (She mixes her own perfume.) On a long and tiring day, she'll come to a recording session wearing a practice outfit, a slightly soiled raincoat, and a thirty-thousand dollar ruby ring, because it gives her a lift. She truly is unsinkable. Unsuccessful marriages and affairs have left her visibly unscarred, but she understands how painful life can be, and her interpretation of 'Roundabout' (a decidedly negative song) emerges indomitably positive." The movie role for Molly Brown was given to Debbie Reynolds, but many people, including this author, believe that Tammy would have done very well in the movie role.

While attending acting school in New York, she went out with Marlon Brando on his motorcycle, and on a Wednesday afternoon in March, 1955, they attended the play The Dark is Light Enough. By the end of the first act, she had fallen in love with one of the performers, Christopher Plummer, and went backstage and introduced herself. Tammy married the distinguished Canadian actor Christopher Plummer on August 16, 1956. Her only child, a daughter, Amanda Michael, was born on March 23, 1957. Amanda was named for a character in Noel Coward's "Private Lives" which Tammy had played twice, once in 1962, for which she won a second Tony Award as Best Dramatic Actress. Tammy and Christopher had considered naming their child Michael Amanda, after actress Michael Learned , who is Amanda's godmother, but Tammy decided Amanda might not like the name Michael. Amanda has never used her middle name. In April, 1960, Tammy and her husband divorced. Tammy has said that after the first few months of their marriage, they were no longer speaking, and only nodded politely when they accidentallly passed each other.

In 1962, Tammy was five feet five inches tall, weighed 123 lbs, and wore her hair in a reddish blonde hairdo. Later, she twice received 'The Mother of the Year Award'. In 1966, Tammy married the actor Jeremy Slate, at the home of her TV show producer, Bill Dozier, and the wedding was attended by about 50 guests, including Tammy's mother and father, and her daughter Amanda who was a flower girl, and by Jeremy's four children from his first marriage. Jeremy had appeared with her on her brief television series, 'The Tammy Grimes Show', in 1966. They lived in Malibu after their wedding in the autumn of 1966, but they were divorced the following year. About 1971, Tammy has said, that she married the composer Richard Bell, who built her a house in New Hampshire, and they are still married after 33 years.

After her divorce from Jeremy Slate, Tammy had moved back to New York City, and for some years, she lived in a Greenwich Village duplex apartment with Amanda and pets, Bear, an old Sheep Dog, and Tiffany, a Siamese cat. In 1977, she was presented the City of New York Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture, by N.Y.C. Mayor Beame. He called her "a witty actress who in theatres from coast to coast strikes the authentic, joyous note of Broadway." By 1987, she lived in her home in New York, with 3 persian cats named Inspector Pamplemousse, Horatio and Pushkin, and she was finishing her book, preparing her second art exhibition, and teaching acting lessons on "Unacting". In 1989, Tammy was acting in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending.

Tammy delighted New York theatregoers with her performance in Rattle of A Simple Man, and in Noel Coward's High Spirits. She starred in the Pulitzer prize winning play, The Only Game in Town. She has appeared in High Spirits (Tony Award), Trick, Gabrielle, California Suite, Tartuffe, Molly, A Month in the Country (with Amanda), 42nd Street, The Imaginary Invalid, The Millionairess, Blythe Spirit and The Taming of the Shrew. Tammy has won many awards including the 1961 Comoedia Matinee Club Award, the 1961 Tony Award , and the 1961 the twenty-third annual Variety poll of drama critics for 'the best musical woman performer'.

On television, during the 1950's, Tammy appeared as Mary in George M. Cohan's Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, on Omnibus on NBC , with Eddie Albert, Eddie Bracken, Rex Harrison, and other well known stars. In 1966 she had decided to appear on television, but decided not to take the lead as Samantha in a new series called Bewitched, and instead was given her own sit-com, called the Tammy Grimes show. Unfortunately, it was canceled during the first season. However, her costar on the show was Dick Sargent, who later went on to play the second Darrin on Bewitched. Tammy went on to record several albums, and has appeared in many more plays and several movies, including Mr. North, Slaves of New York and Can't Stop the Music. The one time she acted with her daughter Amanda, was in the Roundabout Theater's revival of A Month in the Country, in 1979.

Tammy is currently featured in the film Trouble on the Corner and as Ally Sheedy's mother in High Art. Her complete filmography includes America and The Last Unicorn (Voice). Tammy occasionally perform son the stage, television, movies, on Broadway and in occasional touring shows, and recently appeared as the British novelist and author, Jean Rhys in "Jean". In March, 2003 she was performing with a rotational cast in the play 'Wit & Wisdom' at the Arc Light Theatre in N.Y.C.