Actress Dana Wynter Dies at 79

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Broadway veteran Dana Wynter passed away on May 5 in California. She was 79 years old.

Wynter began her cinema career in 1951, playing small roles, often uncredited, in British films. One such was Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951) in which other future leading ladies, Kay Kendall, Diana Dors and Joan Collins played similarly small roles. 

Wynter had more success in New York than in London. She appeared on the stage and on TV, where she had leading roles in Robert Montgomery Presents (1953), Suspense (1954, with Otto Preminger) and Studio One (1955, with Barry Sullivan), among others. In 1954she starred on Broadway in Black-Eyed Susan.
 In 1956 she co-starred with Kevin McCarthy, Larry Gates, and Carolyn Jones, playing Becky Driscoll, in the original film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

She starred opposite Robert Taylor in D-Day the Sixth of June (1956), alongside Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier in Something of Value (1957), Mel Ferrer in Fräulein (1958), Robert Wagner in In Love and War (1958), James Cagney and Don Murray in Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck! (1960), Danny Kaye in On the Double (1961), and George C. Scott in The List of Adrian Messenger (1963).

Over the following twenty years, she appeared as a guest star in literally dozens of television series and in occasional cameo roles in films such as Airport (1970). In 1966-67, she co-starred with Robert Lansing on the television series The Man Who Never Was, but the series lasted only one season. She guest starred in 1969 on the second version of The Donald O'Connor Show. She appeared in an Irish soap opera, Bracken (which also starred a young Gabriel Byrne) from 1978-80. In 1993, she returned to television to play Raymond Burr's wife in The Return of Ironside.

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