Posted on 01/14/2006 10:47:54 AM PST by musicman
Tony Snow just reprted that actress Shelly Winters had died.
Geez, that's cold.
But, I did chuckle
Most people thought so, too. Turns out, it was just her career that died.
No, that was when she jumped the shark.
RIP, Shelly. I will always remember you in "A Place in The Sun" and "The Dairy of Anne Frank".
In her younger days she was a good looking woman. She was also a good actress.
Rest in peace.
Prayers for her family.
She was everywhere in the 70s. Always cheerful, always a pleasure to see.
How sad.
Winters led an interesting life.
I met her once. She came across as pleasant, polite and intelligent.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001859/
She was 86.
An American icon has left. RIP.
Won't be coming down for breakfast.
Also, played Roseanne's grandmother
RIP
I always enjoyed her when she came to visit the Johnny Carson Show. She really cracked me up.
Geez, how old was she? I guess she was pretty frail by now cuz I hadnt heard any news from her in a long time.
Wasnt she in the delta force with Chuckie? I seem to remember her aboard a plane..
That was cold. (but I am also laughing so hard)
From IMDb.com.
One of the most respected actresses of the golden age of Hollywood. Although she didn't have stunning looks, she competed against the best of them. She proved to everyone that great work would never go unnoticed. She wrote several "tell all" biographies that ruffled a few feathers throughout the industry. She is known for being very vocal about her opinions, even if that means offending a few people. She studied at The Actor's Studio in New York.
In her heyday a sultry, svelte, blond leading lady, Shelley Winters is more firmly ensconced in memory as a blowsy, loudmouthed, colorful character type. There is a temptation to confuse the rambling, raucous talk-show guest of past years with the talented actress, so one should keep in mind that this former store clerk has won Oscars for her supporting stints in The Di ary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965), and has earned nominations for A Place in the Sun (1951) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Winters' first film credits were decorative bit parts in such 1940s movies as Knickerbocker Holiday (1944) and Tonight and Every Night (1945). Her first big break was landing a costarring role with Ronald Colman in A Double Life (1947), as the mistress and unfortunate victim of the actor-gone-mad. In the aftermath of that film she was often cast as vulnerable victim types, such as Myrtle in The Great Gatsby (1949) and Alice Tripp in A Place in the Sun (1951), but she also played her share of sexpots, including the title role in Frenchie (1950), a reworking of Destry Rides Again that cast her in the Marlene Dietrich part. She was a standout in the searing Hollywood tale The Big Knife (1955), and the murdered mother in The Night of the Hunter that same year. She was memorable as the nymphet's mother in Lolita (1962), notorious madam Polly Adler in A House Is Not a Home (1964), and one of Alfie's conquests in Alfie (1966), but by the 1970s she was often playing caricatures, like the machine gun-toting Bloody Mama (1970). Paul Mazursky fleshed out potentialcaricature roles for her in Blume in Love (1973) and Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), and she had fun (over)playing a hag in Disney's Pete's Dragon (1977), the Queen of the gypsies in King of the Gypsies (1978), and a super-agent in Blake Edwards' Hollywood saga S.O.B (1981).
From nndb.com:
Two-time Oscar-winning actress Shelley Winters borrowed her stage name from her favorite poet, Percy Shelley, and her mother's maiden name, Winter. The first studio she signed with reportedly added the final "s," but it has also been said that she added the "s" herself when she heard that she was being referred to as "Chilly Winter."
She left school at 15 to work as a counter clerk and model while studying drama and entering beauty pageants, determined to make it as an actress. For her first appearance on Broadway, a 1941 play called The Night Before Christmas, she needed to join the union, Actors Equity, and had to borrow $25 from her sister for dues -- a fortune in those days. Winters has since speculated that her sister, then a student nurse, may have sold blood to come up with the cash.
Winters headed west in the early 1940s, and first signed with Columbia studios, but got mostly bit parts. She shared an apartment with Marilyn Monroe. They two shared a bathing suit for cheesecakes shots and a mink coat for dates. Legend has it that Winters taught Monroe how to "act pretty", by tilting her head back, lowering her eyes, and ever-so-slightly opening her mouth.
Her first film was What A Woman! in 1943, but the titular woman was Rosalind Russell. For years, Winters' roles were small, inconsequential, and rarely noticed. Frustrated with her lack of Hollywood success, Winters began acting in local theater to learn her craft.
She first gained notice in 1947's The Double Life with Ronald Colman. Her classics include Winchester '73 with Jimmy Stewart, The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum, the 1959 Diary of Anne Frank, Lolita with James Mason and Peter Sellers, and the original Alfie with Michael Caine.
Dead serious about acting, in the 1940s Winters studied Shakespeare with Charles Laughton, and sought to gain "a wide experience of literature, and all the plays that have been written, and the whole history of theatre." During the 1950s she worked with Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio to an almost religious degree. She never stopped studying acting until she began teaching it, and she eventually came to be considered one of the great American teachers of "The Method".
She won her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Diary of Anne Frank, and gave the statuette to Frank's father, Otto Frank, for the Anne Frank Museum. She won a second Oscar, and kept it, for her performance as a bigoted Southerner in 1965's A Patch of Blue with Sidney Poitier.
In 1960, Winters was among the sponsors of a very controversial advertisement in The New York Times, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Diahann Carroll, for "The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Freedom in the South." Gloria Steinem once said that Winters helped lay the groundwork for the women's movement, by portraying victims who fought back.
Winters was one of Robert De Niro's first fans. She was introduced to him by her goddaughter, actress Sally Kirkland, and she cast De Niro in one of his first noteworthy roles, as her psychopathic, drug-addled son in Bloody Mama. She is 23 years older than De Niro, but some accounts suggest she may have slept with him.
In her later years as sort of a camp queen, Winters swam in The Poseidon Adventure with an all-star cast turned upside-down, and once poured her drink over Oliver Reed's head after he made a sexist remark on Carson's Tonight Show. Among her other late-career memorable roles, she played the quintessential Jewish mother in Next Stop, Greenwich Village with Ellen Greene and Christopher Walken, Elvis's mom in the Kurt Russell TV movie Elvis, and Roseanne Barr's grandmother on that long-running 1990s sitcom.
She has written two autobiographies, which told some readers much more than they needed to know about Winters' love life. Her long list of conquests purportedly includes Robert Blake, Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Albert Finney, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, John Garfield, Sterling Hayden, William Holden, Howard Hughes, Joseph P. Kennedy, Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, and Lawrence Tierney, among others. Bette Davis is said to have once asked, "Who the hell hasn't Shelley Winters slept with?"
Some sources list Winters' birthdate as 1922, a little deception from decades ago that probably helped her land a few roles.
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