One needn't look too closely at the credits of Susannah Grant to notice a glimmer of fairy-tale sensibility shining through. Claiming to have spent a sizeable portion of her youth convinced that she might someday become the princess that she read about in so many stories, Grant fittingly received her earliest screenplay credit for the romantic international sleeper hit Ever After (1998).
A New York City native, born January 4, 1963, Grant was raised in Englewood, NJ. One of four siblings, including three sisters and a brother, with a doctor father and a schoolteacher mother, Grant had an unusual childhood (by showbiz standards, anyway), given its overwhelming stability. Following her primary schooling at Miss Porter's School, a well-to-do independent boarding and day school for girls in Farmington, CT, Grant entered Amherst and was later admitted to the American Film Institute, where she found a mentor in the form of screenwriting teacher Jerry Cass. After learning the tricks of the trade and developing her skills, Grant was honored with the Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting. Soon after finding work on Party of Five, Grant was approached to pen a script for the Disney retelling of the Pocahontas legend. Though a big break in that it enabled her to land a major writing credit, Grant found much frustration in the fact that the screenplay played a secondary role to storyboards in the production of an animated feature.
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