Shelley Winters, Actress, - Biography
Actress
Birth name Shirley Schrift
Born August
18, 1920, St. Louis, Missouri
Died January 14, 2006, Beverly Hills, California
Height Height: 5 foot 4 ( 1.63 M )
Shelley Winters
was a two-time Academy Award-winning American actress.
Winters was born Shirley
Schrift in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Jewish parents - Jonas Schrift
& Rose Winter. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York when she was 3 years
old.
She studied in the Hollywood Studio Club, sharing the same bedroom with another beginner: Marilyn Monroe. As the New York Times obituary noted, "A major movie presence for more than five decades, Shelley Winters turned herself into a widely respected actress who won two Oscars." Winters originally broke into Hollywood as "the Blonde Bombshell ," but quickly tired of the role's limitations. She washed off her makeup & played against type to set up Elizabeth Taylor's beauty in A Place in the Sun, still a landmark American film.
As the Associated Press reported, the general public was unaware of how serious a craftswoman Winters was. "Although she was in demand as a character actress, Winters continued to study her craft. She attended Charles Laughton's Shakespeare classes & worked at the Actors Studio, both as student & teacher."
Her first movie was There's Something About a Soldier (1943). In 1959, she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The Diary of Anne Frank & another for A Patch of Blue (1965). Notable later roles included her turn as the once gorgeous, alcoholic former starlet "Fay Estabrook" in Harper (1966) & in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) as the ill-fated "Mrs. Belle Rosen", for which she received her final Oscar nomination. (She later reunited with her Poseidon co-star, Jack Albertson in a number of episodes of Albertson's sitcom Chico & the Man during the mid-1970s.)
Always conscious of her Jewish heritage—she had first learned her trade in the Borscht Belt—she donated her Oscar for Anne Frank to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
As the Associated Press reported, "During her 50 years as a widely known personality, Winters was rarely out of the news. Her stormy marriages, her romances with famous stars, her forays into politics & feminist causes kept her name before the public. She delighted in giving provocative interviews & seemed to have an opinion on everything."
That led to a second career as a writer. Though not an overwhelming beauty, her acting, wit, & "chutzpah" gave her a love life to rival Monroe's. In late life, she recalled her conquests in autobiographies so popular they undermined her reputation as a serious actor. She wrote of a yearly rendezvous she kept with William Holden, as well as her affairs with Burt Lancaster & Marlon Brando.
Winters suffered an enormous weight gain later in life, frequently stating that it was a marketing tool, since there were plenty of prominent normal-weight older actresses but fewer overweight ones, & her obesity would enable her to find work more easily. In 1973 Winters even put on a short-lived Broadway musical review entitled "The Hoofing Hollywood Heffer", co-starring Charles Nelson Reilly & Bongo. a tap-dancing chimp. Although it closed after only 8 performances, this show was applauded for its sheer campy bravado by many critics, one of whom stated that Winters was a "Whale of a Talent looking for a sea of applause big enough to rest her massive girth".
Audiences born in the 1980s knew her primarily for the autobiographies & for her television work, in which she played a humorous parody of her public persona. In a recurring role in the early 1990s, Winters played the title character's grandmother on the top-rated ABC sitcom Roseanne, which had the bizarre effect of making her play Estelle Parsons' (who played Roseanne's lesbian mother) mother, although Parsons was only 7 years younger, & looked about the same age as Winters.
She was married four times. Her husbands were:
1) Capt. Mack Paul Mayer, whom
she married on New Years Day, 1943; they divorced in October 1948. Mayer was unable
to deal with Shelley's "Hollywood lifestyle" & wanted a traditional
homemaker for a wife. Winters wore his wedding ring up until her death & kept
their relationship very private.
2) Vittorio Gassman, whom she married on
April 28, 1952; they divorced on June 2, 1954. They had one child, Vittoria, a
physician, who practices internal medicine at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Connecticut.
She was Winters' only child.
3) Anthony Franciosa, whom she married on May
4, 1957; they divorced on November 18, 1960.
4) Gerry DeFord, married by Sally
Kirkland on January 14, 2006, hours before her death.
Shortly before her death,
Winters married long-time companion Gerry DeFord, with whom she had lived for
nineteen years. Though Winters' daughter objected to the marriage, the actress
Sally Kirkland, an ordained minister, performed the wedding ceremony for the two
at Winters' deathbed. Non-denominational last rites for Winters were performed
by Kirkland, a minister of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness.
Death
Winters
died on January 14, 2006 of heart failure at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly
Hills at the age of 85 a few hours after she married DeFord; she had suffered
a heart attack on October 14, 2005. Ex-husband Anthony Franciosa died of a stroke
five days later.
Site written in Mat 2007
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