Shelley Winters

Shelley Winters was born Shirley Schrift of very humble beginnings on August 18, 1920 (some sources list 1922) in East St. Louis, Illinois. Her mother, Rose Winter, was born in Missouri, to Austrian Jewish parents, and her father, Jonas Schrift, was an Austrian Jewish immigrant. She had one sibling, a sister, Blanche. Her father moved the family to Brooklyn when she was still young so that he, a tailor's cutter, could find steadier work closer to the city's garment industry. An unfailing interest in acting occurred quite early for Shelley and she appeared in high school plays. By her mid-to-late teens she had already been employed as a Woolworth's store clerk, model, borscht belt vaudevillian and nightclub chorine, all in order to pay for her acting classes.

Is one of ten actresses to win an Academy Award for portraying a prostitute. The others in chronological order are Helen Hayes (The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931)), Donna Reed (From Here to Eternity (1953)), Susan Hayward (I Want to Live! (1958)), Elizabeth Taylor (BUtterfield 8 (1960)), Shirley Jones (Elmer Gantry (1960)), Jane Fonda (Klute (1971)), Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite (1995)), Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential (1997)) and Charlize Theron (Monster (2003)).

During a nationwide search in 1939 for GWTW's Scarlett O'Hara, Shelley was advised by auditioning director George Cukor to get acting lessons, which she did.

Apprenticing in summer stock, she made her Broadway debut in the short-lived comedy "The Night Before Christmas" in 1941 and followed it with the operetta "Rosalinda" (1942) initially billing herself in both shows as Shelley Winter (without the "s"). Within a short time, Shelley pushed ahead for a career out west. Hollywood proved to be a tough road. Toiling in bit roles for years, many of her scenes were excised altogether during her early days.

Winters got her first screen test after Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn saw her on Broadway in Max Reinhardt's "Rosalind" in 1942. He met her on a Saturday night backstage and asked that she audition the following day during a blizzard. Although she was only 16, she told Cohn she was 21, and he personally directed her test. Cohn left immediately afterward for Hollywood, and three weeks later she received two train tickets with an order to report to Columbia Studios for a role in Cover Girl (1944). Cohn personally called Washington to free up Winters' husband, who was finishing basic training in Louisiana. Unfortunately, she arrived too late for Cover Girl (1944).

Obscurely used in such movies as What a Woman! (1943), The Racket Man (1944), Cover Girl (1944) and Tonight and Every Night (1945), her breakthrough did not occur until 1947, and it happened on both the stage and big screen.

Not only did she win the replacement role of Ado Annie Carnes in "Oklahoma!" on Broadway but, around the same time, scored excellent notices on film as the party girl waitress who ends up a victim of deranged strangler (and Oscar winner) Ronald Colman in the critically-hailed A Double Life (1947) directed by Cukor.

From this moment, a somewhat earthy film stardom was to be hers playing second-lead broads who often met untimely ends (as in Cry of the City (1948) and The Great Gatsby (1949)), or tawdry-black-stockinged and feather-boa-adorned leads, as in South Sea Sinner (1950) in which her eclectic co-stars included Macdonald Carey and Liberace!As a tarnished glamour girl and symbol of working class vulgarity in Hollywood, Shelley was about to be written off in pictures altogether when one of her finest movie roles arrived on her front porch.

By the late 1950s, she had started growing in girth and wisely eased into colorful character supports. The switch paid off.

Her best hard luck girl storyboard showed up in the form of depressed, frumpy-looking Alice Tripp, a factory girl seduced and abandoned by wanderlust Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951). Favoring gorgeous society girl Elizabeth Taylor who is totally out of his league, Clift is subsequently blackmailed by Winters' pathetic (and now pregnant) character into marrying her. For her desperate efforts, she is purposely drowned by Clift after he tips their canoe. The role, which garnered Shelley her first Oscar nomination, finally plucked her out of the sordid starlet pool she was treading and into the ranks of serious femme star contenders. But not for long. Winters just couldn't escape the lurid bottle-blonde quality she instilled in her characters. During what should have been her peak time in films were a host of badly-scripted "B" films.

The obvious, two-dimensional chorines, barflies, floozies and gold diggers she played in Behave Yourself! (1951), Frenchie (1950), Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), Playgirl (1954) and Mambo (1954), the latter of which co-starred second husband Vittorio Gassman, pretty much said it all. She grew extremely disenchanted and decided to return to dramatic study.

Gave birth to her only child at age 32, a daughter Vittoria Gassman on February 14, 1953. Child's father was her 2nd ex-husband, Vittorio Gassman.

Earning membership into the famed Actor's Studio, she went to Broadway and earned kudos, thereby reestablishing her reputation as a strong actress with the drug-themed play "A Hatful of Rain" (1955).

Her renewed dedication to pursuing quality work was shown by her appearances in a number of heavyweight theater roles including Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1955). In later years, the Actors Studio enthusiast became one of its most respected coaches, shaping up a number of today's fine talent with the Strasberg "method" technique.

After a sterling performance as the ill-fated wife of sadistic killer Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), she scored big in the Oscar department when she won "Best Supporting Actress" for the shrill and hypertensive but doomed Mrs.

Co-starring in the show was the up-and-coming Anthony Franciosa, whom she took as her third husband in 1957.

Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).

Thrice divorced (her first husband was a WWII captain, while her only child, Vittoria, came from her second union to Italian stallion Gassman), she remained footloose and fancy free after finally breaking it off with the volatile Franciosa in 1960. Her stormy marriages and notorious affairs, not to mention her ambitious forays into politics and feminist causes, kept her name alive for decades.

Appeared with Telly Savalas in five films: The Young Savages (1961), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968), The Scalphunters (1968) and Alice in Wonderland (1985).

From this period sprouted a host of revoltingly bad mamas, blowsy matrons, and trashy madams in such film fare as Lolita (1962), The Chapman Report (1962), The Balcony (1963) Wives and Lovers (1963), and A House Is Not a Home (1964).

She topped things off as the abusive prostitute mom in A Patch of Blue (1965) who was not above pimping her own blind daughter (the late Elizabeth Hartman) for household money. The actress managed to place a second Oscar on her mantle for this riveting support work.

With advancing age and increasing size, she found a comfortable niche in the harping Jewish wife/mother category with loud, flashy, unsubtle roles in Enter Laughing (1967), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) and, most notably, The Poseidon Adventure (1972). She earned another Oscar nomination for "Poseidon" while portraying her third drowning victim.

At around the same time, she scored quite well as the indomitable Marx Brothers' mama in "Minnie's Boys" on Broadway in 1970.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed into an oddly-distracted personality on TV, making countless talk show appearances and becoming quite the raconteur and incessant name dropper with her juicy Hollywood behind-the-scenes tales. Candid would be an understatement when she published two scintillating tell-all autobiographies that reached the best seller's list.

In The Poseidon Adventure (1972), she plays a former award-winning swimmer and in A Place in the Sun (1951), she cannot swim at all. She drowns in both films.

On the September 26, 1975 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), she grew tired of Oliver Reed's attitude towards women. They had a heated conversation and, after Winters told Reed what she thought of his opinions, she left the set. The show continued with Reed going on about women while Johnny Carson looked at him in a daze. Shortly afterward, Winters appeared from stage left, unannounced to Reed and to the shock of Carson. She was carrying a beverage glass and surprised Reed by dumping it over his head. Reed went on to finish his statement as if nothing had happened and later claimed the beverage was whiskey.

"Shelley, Also Known as Shirley" (1981) and "Shelley II: The Middle of My Century" (1989) detailed dalliances with Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, William Holden, Sean Connery and Clark Gable, to name a few.

She had a role in Always (1985) and filmed a few scenes, but at one point she had a tantrum and left the set. Her agent pleaded with her to go back and resume her role, but she refused. She was replaced and the scenes reshot. She does not appear in the finished film, unsurprisingly.

Showed up drunk on her first day of shooting of The Linguini Incident (1991) and was fired by director Richard Shepard.

She was a huge fan of the television series Babylon 5 (1993).

She worked in films until the beginning of the millennium, her last film being the easily-dismissed Italian feature La bomba (1999). She enjoyed Emmy-winning TV work and had the recurring role of Roseanne Barr's tell-it-like-it-is grandmother on the comedienne's self-named sitcom. Her last years were marred by failing health and, for the most part, she was confined to a wheelchair.

Her marriage to Anthony Franciosa broke up when he had an affair with Lauren Bacall. During their affair, Bacall once called up Winters and complained, "I've been waiting for Tony for an hour. Where the hell is he?" Winters said, "You're complaining to me because my husband is late for a date with you?", to which Bacall replied, "If your husband doesn't respect your marriage, why should I?" Coincidentally, Winters and Anthony Franciosa died five days apart in 2005.

In November 2020, she was honored as Turner Classic Movies Star of the Month.