Shelley Winters, two-time Oscar winner, dies at 85

LOS ANGELES — Shelley Winters, 85, a blond bombshell of the 1940s who evolved into a character actress best known for her roles as victims, shrews and matrons, died Saturday.

Miss Winters, the first actress to win two Oscars in the best-supporting category, died Saturday of heart failure at The Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills, her publicist Dale Olson said. She was hospitalized in October after a heart attack.

A major movie presence for more than 50 years, Miss Winters turned herself from a self-described "dumb blond bombshell" in B pictures to a widely respected actress who was nominated four times for Academy Awards.

Her first Oscar, for best supporting actress, was for her performance in "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959) as the middle-age Mrs. Van Daan, one of eight Dutch Jews hiding from the Nazis in an attic.

She won again for best supporting actress as Rose-Ann D'Arcy, the abusive mother who tries to turn her blind daughter into a prostitute in "A Patch of Blue" (1965).

The actress donated the first Oscar statuette to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

After a series of bit parts, Miss Winters received her first big break as the waitress who was strangled by Ronald Colman's jealous actor in "A Double Life" in 1947.

Four years later, she dyed her hair brown, rubbed the polish off her fingernails and convinced director George Stevens she could play the mousy factory girl who was made pregnant and then drowned by Montgomery Clift so he could marry the rich Elizabeth Taylor in "A Place in the Sun." She was nominated for an Oscar as best actress for that performance.

Vulnerable characters

Tough-talking and oozing sex appeal, Miss Winters was blowzy, vulgar and often pathetically vulnerable in her early films. In movie after movie, she played working-class women who were violently discarded by men who had used them.

When her gullible waitress couldn't lead the "preacher" to a cache of stolen money in "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), he slit her throat.

As a rich man's poor mistress in "The Great Gatsby" (1949), she was casually run over by her lover's wife.

In Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita" (1962), James Mason married her to get close to her young daughter; when she finds this out she runs in front of a car and is killed.

Even when she became the dominating force in many of her later movies, Miss Winters often played vulnerable monsters. As Ma Barker in the 1970 cult classic "Bloody Mama" — in which she is first seen giving her four grown sons their Saturday-night baths — she was murderously maternal while brandishing a tommy gun.

Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker about Miss Winters' performance as the "hysteric on the loose" mother in Paul Mazursky's "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" (1976), said: "With her twinkly goo-goo eyes and flirty grin, [she's)] a mother hippo charging — not at her son's enemies but at him. Fat, morose, irrepressible, she's a force that would strike terror to anyone's heart, yet in some abominable way she's likable."

Food and men

Off screen, Miss Winters lived with an equal gusto, which she captured in her best-selling 1980 autobiography, "Shelley, Also Known as Shirley," and in a second book, in 1989, "Shelley II: In the Middle of My Century."

With a hearty appetite for food and men, she was not hesitant about naming the actors with whom she had shared a bed, including Sean Connery, Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Farley Granger, Sterling Hayden, William Holden and Burt Lancaster.

Miss Winters and Holden had a "Same Time, Next Year" relationship, meeting in his Paramount dressing room on Christmas Eve for five years. She wrote that despite their intimacy, they continued to refer to each other as "Mr. Holden" and "Miss Winters," and when they met on the set of the 1981 film "S.O.B.," she said, "Hello, Mr. Holden." He smiled and replied, "Shelley, after your book, I think you should call me Bill."

Her two-year relationship with Lancaster was more serious. She ended the affair when the actor's wife became pregnant with his third child.

Miss Winters said she was a "role model" for Marilyn Monroe. When, as young actresses, they shared a Hollywood apartment, she taught Monroe the sexy, lips-apart look for which Monroe became famous, Miss Winters said.

She was born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis. Although most sources give her birth date as Aug. 18, 1922, she told Variety's Army Archerd in 2004 that she had lied to studio head Harry Cohn when she signed with Columbia Pictures and was born two years earlier.

Her stage name came from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and from her mother, Rose Winter, an amateur soprano who had once won a Municipal Opera contest in St. Louis.

Her father, like many immigrants in the early 20th century, came to the United States in steerage. Her mother, a first-generation American, was born in St. Louis. The Schrifts soon moved to Brooklyn, where Miss Winters grew up.

When her father went to prison for arson (he was exonerated later), 9-year-old Shirley retreated into a fantasy world that, Miss Winters wrote, "has been a powerful tool in my acting" but "used to play hell with my real life."

As a teenager, wearing high heels borrowed from her older sister, and with six powder puffs stuffed into her bra, she auditioned during a nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind."

Taking Cukor's advice

Director George Cukor was kind. Go to acting school, he told her, and become known on the New York stage. She took his advice. Less than a decade later, Cukor cast her as the sexy waitress who serves more than dinner in "A Double Life."

As a Columbia Pictures contract player earning $100 a week, Miss Winters made her 1943 film debut with one line in "What a Woman!" She took acting lessons at the studio, joined the Actor's Lab to study acting at night and eventually became a teacher at the Actors Studio.

During the 1960s, Miss Winters found her métier as a character actress. In addition to her Oscar-winning roles, she played the mother of a murderer in "The Young Savages" (1961); a middle-age woman who throws away a happy marriage for a handsome young man in "The Chapman Report" (1962); and Michael Caine's voracious bedmate in "Alfie" (1966).

Winters' fourth and last Oscar nomination came in 1972, for her supporting role in "The Poseidon Adventure."

She played a former swimming champion who sacrifices her life to help save fellow passengers on a doomed ship. By then, she had put on a good deal of weight, and following a scene in which her character must swim frantically, she charmed audiences with the line: "In the water I'm a very skinny lady."

Acknowledging the film's rich potential for parody, she appeared on "The Flip Wilson Show" in a skit set in a fast-flooding laundromat. She led the cast in a daring escape through a washing-machine hatch.

An early marriage during World War II to Army Air Force Capt. Paul Mayer lasted until the war ended. Miss Winters married Italian actor Vittorio Gassman in 1952. The couple divorced in 1954 after the birth of her daughter and only child, Vittoria Gassman, now a physician in Connecticut. In 1957, Miss Winters married Anthony Franciosa, her co-star on Broadway in "A Hatful of Rain." That marriage ended in 1960.

Miss Winters is survived by her companion of 19 years, Jerry DeFord; her daughter; and two grandchildren.

Material from The Associated Press and The Washington Post is included in this report.