Oscar Winner Shelley Winters Dies

Shelley Winters, the double Oscar winner and sex symbol from the golden age of Hollywood, has died at the age of 85. The actress, who had romances with some of Hollywood’s leading men including Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Marlon Brando, died of heart failure at a Beverly Hills nursing home early yesterday. She had been hospitalized in October after suffering a heart attack.

Winters won Academy Awards for best supporting actress in The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue. Her other films included Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, Alfie with Michael Caine, The Night of the Hunter opposite Robert Mitchum and The Poseidon Adventure.

Her career spanned six decades, beginning with an uncredited part in What a Woman! in 1943 and ending with La Bomba in 1999. She enjoyed a prolonged swansong as Roseanne’s grandmother in the Nineties TV hit Roseanne, when she was well into her seventies.

Winters started as a nightclub chorus girl, advancing to supporting roles in New York plays before fame as a Hollywood pin-up. She switched to serious roles as she matured. Connie Stevens, the actress and long-time friend of Winters, said she was ‘an idol of mine - and many’. She added that Winters was ‘an extraordinary woman with powerful charisma, enormous talent and a keen, perceptive mind’.

Ever vocal on social and political matters, Winters, who was born Shirley Schrift, was a favorite guest on television talk shows, and she demonstrated her frankness in two volumes of autobiography: 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. Her ex-husbands included the actors Anthony Franciosa and Vittorio Gassman. She once said: ‘In Hollywood, all the marriages are happy. It’s trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.’ A daughter, Vittoria, resulted from the marriage to Gassman.

In the books, Winters also described sharing a flat with Marilyn Monroe when they were both unknowns. The revelations in Winters’s autobiographies provided endless material for interviewers and gossip writers.

Robert Mitchum once told her: ‘Shelley, arguing with you is like trying to hold a conversation with a swarm of bumblebees.’

In The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959, she played Petronella Van Daan, the mother of Peter Van Daan and one of the eight Jewish refugees who hid for more than a year in the cramped quarters of the famous secret annex until they were finally betrayed and sent to the Nazi death camps. Winters donated her Oscar statuette to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

In Patch of Blue in 1965, she portrayed a hateful, foul-mouthed mother who tries to keep her blind daughter, away from the kind black man who has befriended her.