Oscar-Winning Stage and Screen Star Shelley Winters Dies at 85

By: Jan. 14, 2006
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Shelley Winters, the dynamic blonde actress whose career took her from sexpot to respected Oscar-winning stage and screen actress, has passed away at the age of 85. She died of heart failure early January 14th; Winters had been hospitalized at the The Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills after suffering a heart attack.

Born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis on August 18th, 1920, and raised in Brooklyn, Winters began her show business career as a nightclub chorus girl, model and actress in Borscht Circuit plays and musicals before progressing to supporting roles in Broadway plays such as The Night Before Christmas and Rosalinda. While appearing in the latter, the actress was offered a Columbia Pictures contract by studio boss Harry Cohn and appeared in films such as Knickerbocker Holiday, Cover Girl and Tonight and Every Night. Tiring of not getting the roles she wanted ("all the good roles at the studio were going to Jean Arthur in those days," states an Associated Press article), she traveled back to Broadway and played Ado Annie during the original run of Oklahoma!

While best-known for her screen career, Winters would return to Broadway on numerous occasion; in the short-lived 1970 musical Minnie's Boys, she played the mother of the Marx Brothers. Other Broadway credits included A Hatful or Rain, Girls of Summer, Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, Under the Weather and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

Upon her return from Broadway, Winters signed a seven-year Universal contract and played seductive roles in a number of films--among them South Sea Sinner, The Raging Tide and Frenchie. During that time, she also appeared in the most prestigious A Double Life, starring Ronald Colman.

It was 1951's A Place in the Sun that signalled her rise as a serious actress; she received her first Academy Award nomination (although director George Stevens at first thought her to sexy to play the role of the spurned pregnant girl who is drowned by Montgomery Clift's character). Winters, who both studied and taught at The Actors Studio during the course of her career, received another nomination for 1972's The Poseidon Adventure as well as two Academy Awards for The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue. Winters played mothers--one kind and one not--in both films, and later donated her Oscar from the former film to the Anne Frank Museum.

The doomed Charlotte Haze in Lolita was another maternal role for which Winter received praise, while other noteworthy films in the actress' varied career included Executive Suite, The Night of the Hunter, The Big Knife, I Am a Camera, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Alfie, Arthur! Arthur!, Cleopatra Jones, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Pete's Dragon and The Portrait of a Lady. Long established as a character actress, she also appeared on numerous TV shows, and became known to a younger generation for her role as Nana Mary on "Roseanne."

Winters' love life often fascinated the press and public, and she wrote openly of them (as well as her liberal social and political sentiments) in two autobiographical volumes--Shelley, Also Known as Shirley (1980) and Shelley II: The Middle of My Century (1989). The actress--who was thrice married to Paul "Mack" Mayer, and Italian actors Vittorio Gassman and Anthony Franciosa--also racked up liaisons with Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, among others. With Gassman, she had a daughter, Vittoria, by whom she is survived.

"Shelley, arguing with you is like trying to hold a conversation with a swarm of bumblebees," Robert Mitchum remarked once of the accomplished and always outspoken actress.


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