BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Shelley Winters, the forceful, outspoken star who graduated from blond bombshell parts to dramas, winning Academy Awards as supporting actress in “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “A Patch of Blue,” has died. She was 85.
Winters died of heart failure early Saturday at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills, her publicist Dale Olson said. She had been hospitalized in October after suffering a heart attack.
The actress sustained her long career by repeatedly reinventing herself. Starting as a nightclub chorus girl, she advanced to supporting roles in New York plays, then became famous as a Hollywood sexpot.
A devotee of the Actors Studio, she switched to serious roles as she matured. Her Oscars were for her portrayal of mothers. Still working well into her 70s, she had a recurring role as Roseanne’s grandmother on the 1990s TV show “Roseanne.”
In 1959’s “The Diary of Anne Frank,” she was Petronella Van Daan, mother of Peter Van Daan and one of eight real-life Jewish refugees in World War II Holland who hid for more than a year in cramped quarters until they were betrayed and sent to Nazi death camps. The socially conscious Winters donated her Oscar statuette to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
In 1965’s “Patch of Blue,” she portrayed a hateful, foul-mouthed mother who tries to keep her blind daughter, who is white, from a black man who befriends her.
Ever vocal on social and political matters, Winters was a favored guest on television talk shows, and she demonstrated her frankness in two autobiographies: “Shelley, Also Known as Shirley” (1980) and “Shelley II: The Middle of My Century” (1989).
Winters wrote openly in them of her romances with Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and other leading men. She also said after she came to Hollywood in the mid-1940s she was roommates with another rising starlet, Marilyn Monroe.
“I’ve had it all,” she exulted after her first book became a bestseller. “I’m excited about the literary aspects of my career. My concentration is there now.”
Winters, whose given name was Shirley Schrift, was appearing in the Broadway hit “Rosalinda” when Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn offered her a screen test. A Columbia contact and a new name – Shelley Winters – followed, but all the good roles at the studio were going to Jean Arthur in those days.
She later signed to a seven-year contract at Universal, where she was transformed into a blond bombshell. The only hint of her future as an actress came in 1948’s “A Double Life” as a trashy waitress strangled by a Shakespearean actor, Ronald Colman. The role won Colman an Oscar.
“A Place in the Sun” in 1951 brought her first Oscar nomination and established her as a serious actress. She desperately sought the role of the pregnant factory girl drowned by Montgomery Clift so he could marry Elizabeth Taylor. The director, George Stevens, rejected her at first for being too sexy.
“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,” she recalled in a 1962 interview.
Winters received her final Oscar nomination for 1972’s “The Poseidon Adventure,” in which she was one of a handful of passengers scrambling to survive aboard an ocean liner turned upside down by a large wave.
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