Actress Shelley Winters has died:
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) – 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, 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, apart from the kind black man who has befriended 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).
She wrote openly in them of her romances with Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and other leading men.
“I’ve had it all,” she exulted after her first book became a best seller. “I’m excited about the literary aspects of my career. My concentration is there now.”
Shirley Shrift (her real name) is probably known to most youngsters for playing Roseanne Barr’s grandmother in the TV show, “Roseanne” but, for those of us who are a little older, she was a real movie star who played “tough girl” parts in the 1950’s and 60’s. She started off in pictures in the early 1940’s as an extra and playing uncredited roles or “Girl” or “Secretary”. Her first major role was in Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 opposite Jimmy Stewart. She continued with leading roles playing opposite most of the leading men of the period including John Garfield, Montgomery Clift, William Holden, and Alan Ladd with many of whom she had affairs (not Montgomery Clift, of course)—and told in her 1980 autobiography “Shelley, Also Known as Shirley”.
She looked, acted, and, an East St. Louisan, probably was tough. An original.
