On Saturday, Hollywood character actress Shelley Winters, who was known for her saucy comments and her kiss-and-tell off-screen romances, passed away due to a heart attack at The Rehabilitation Center of Beverly Hills at the age of 85.
Winters, who debuted with a small, uncredited role in a 1943 film
What a Woman!, went from being a blond bombshell to a character artiste, bagging two Oscars for her supporting roles in
The Diary of Anne Frank and
A Patch of Blue.
In
The Diary of Anne Frank, which released in 1959, she slipped easily into the character of Petronella Van Daan, one of the Jews hiding with the Frank family to escape the Nazis, while in
A Patch of Blue, a 1965 film, she played a racist woman who abused her visually impaired daughter.
Winters' USP lay in her ability to move with her age and the times, reinventing herself to suit the need of the hour. Starting out as a sex bomb, she moved on to do character roles when age made her earlier blond bimbo roles obsolete. Among her more notable films are
A Place in the Sun,
The Poseidon Adventure,
Night of the Hunter,
Lolita,
The Greatest Story Ever Told,
Alfie,
Harper,
An American Tragedy and
Over the Brooklyn Bridge, among others.
In 1951,
A Place in the Sun got her nominated for the best actress Oscar, while for
The Poseidon Adventure, in 1972, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her character of a girl who saves drowning passengers of an ocean liner.
Winters worked hard to suit the roles that she took up, a fact that was evident in how she bagged the role of a meek, shy girl in
A Place in the Sun. At first, director George Stevens rejected her for the role because he found her too sexy and sophisticated to play the character of a de-glamorized shy girl, so different from Winters' own personality. “So I scrubbed off all my makeup, pulled my hair back and sat next to him at the Hollywood Athletic Club without his even recognizing me because I looked so plain. That got me the part,” Winters said while explaining how she convinced Stevens to give her the part of the pregnant girl murdered by Montgomery Clift's character who is smitten with Elizabeth Taylor's character in the film.
The outspoken actress's last film was
La Bomba in 1999. Towards the end of her career, she also played an important role in
Roseanne, a 90s TV sitcom on ABC. Her Broadway greats include
A Hatful of Rain and
Minnie's Boys.
Born on August 18, 1920 as Shirley Schrift in East St Louis in Illinois to Rose and Jonas Schrift, Winters grew up in a poor household. She attributed her acting talents to the alternate reality that she created for herself. “My childhood is a blur of memories. Money was so scarce in my family that at the age of nine, I was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. It was during this stage of my life that I developed a whole fantasy world; reality was too unbearable,” she had written in her autobiography. During her career struggle, she also shared a room with Marilyn Monroe, who at that time was a struggling actress herself.
Winters also enjoyed romances with a number of famous actors, among which were Burt Lancaster, Errol Flynn, Farley Granger, Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Sterling Hayden, and William Holden. She gave steamy details of her romances with them in her autobiographies –
Shelley, Also Known as Shirley and
Shelley II: The Middle of My Century. She was married twice – once to actor Anthony Franciosa and twice to actor Vittorio Gassman, with whom she had a daughter, Vittoria.
