Shelley Winters
Shelley Winters is an actor, born 1920.
Shelley Winters chose her own name in 1943, Shelley for her favourite poet and Winters from her mother's family, then spent seven decades making sure it stayed on screen. The early work was studio blonde casting, Lola Manners in Winchester '73, Pat Kroll in A Double Life, and it produced her first great performance almost by accident. Alice Tripp in A Place in the Sun is the plain, needy, inconvenient girlfriend, played with so little vanity that the film's cruelty lands on the audience instead of on her, and it brought an Academy Award nomination.
She won two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress, for The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959 and A Patch of Blue in 1965, and a Primetime Emmy as well. In between and after, she was American film's definitive casualty: Willa Harper in The Night of the Hunter, Charlotte Haze in Lolita, Ruby in Alfie, Kate Barker in Bloody Mama. She was an active member of the Actors Studio and it shows, in a technique that could look enormous and still be exact to the inch.
The 1970s remade her as a disaster movie fixture and a character comedian. Belle Rosen in The Poseidon Adventure brought another Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe, and from there she went on through Pete's Dragon, The Tenant, Next Stop Greenwich Village and Elvis, and later Nana Mary on Roseanne and Mrs. Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady. She worked into the 1990s and died in 2006, having outlasted the studio system and several complete changes of taste.
Movies (46)
- Ellie (1984)
- Lolita (1962)
- The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
- The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
- The Delta Force (1986)
- The Night of the Hunter (1955)
- The Tenant (1976)
- Heavy (1995)
- Pete's Dragon (1977)
- Harper (1966)
- Winchester '73 (1950)
- The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
- S.O.B. (1981)
- A Place in the Sun (1951)
- The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
- Jury Duty (1995)
- King of the Gypsies (1978)
- Alfie (1966)
- The Silence of the Hams (1994)
- Tentacles (1977)
- The Scalphunters (1968)
- Elvis (1979)
- Steve McQueen: Man on the Edge (1990)
- Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July (1979)
- Cleopatra Jones (1973)
- Broadway's Dreamers: The Legacy of the Group Theatre (1989)
- The Visitor (1979)
- Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968)
- A Patch of Blue (1965)
- Bloody Mama (1970)
TV (19)
- The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)
- The Mike Douglas Show (1961)
- Late Night with David Letterman (1982)
- Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre (1963)
- Vicki! (1992)
- Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965)
- The United States Steel Hour (1953)
- The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts (1973)
- Alcoa Premiere (1961)
- Chico and the Man (1974)
- DuPont Show of the Month (1957)
- Roseanne (1988)
- Producers' Showcase (1954)
- Charlie Rose (1991)
- That's Life (1968)
- The David Susskind Show (1959)
- The French Atlantic Affair (1979)
- The Hollywood Greats (1977)
- Alice in Wonderland (1985)
Where to start with Shelley Winters
The Night of the Hunter is the one to see first, and not only for her: it is among the strangest American films ever released, and her Willa is its most heartbreaking piece of casting, a lonely woman written as prey and played without a shred of self pity.
Then A Place in the Sun, where she has the hardest job in the picture, being the person the audience is invited to find inconvenient. A Patch of Blue is the award winning performance that is genuinely uncomfortable to sit through, a brutal mother with nothing allowed to soften her. Lolita shows the comic instrument, all social ambition and misplaced refinement.
For the later Winters, The Poseidon Adventure is the popular one and better than its reputation, Bloody Mama the lurid one, Alfie the sharpest supporting turn, and Next Stop, Greenwich Village the warmest.