Shelley Winters

The Woman Who Died 100 Deaths: Shelley Winters (1920-2006)
[20 January 2006]

Though she met any number of violent ends on screen, it is comforting to know that Shelley Winters died of natural causes at her home in Beverly Hills.

by Amanda Ann Klein

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Born Shirley Schrift in East St. Louis on 18 August 1920, Shelley Winters starred in approximately 130 feature films, was nominated for four Academy Awards and won two, in 1965 for A Patch of Blue and 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank. While many women actors of her generation found themselves pigeonholed as types, Winters, an aficionado of the Actors Studio, pursued roles that resisted categories. If there was one strand linking her choices, it was that her characters often met nasty ends, whether they deserved it or not.

Winters' Hollywood experience began with a series of bit parts -- "secretary," "young woman," "dance hall girl" -- for Columbia. After a notable turn in George Cukor's A Double Life in 1947, she signed a seven-year contract with Universal, and played the "blonde bombshell" in various musicals and gangster films.

Her career took off when she famously washed off her makeup and pulled back her hair to convince George Stevens that she was right for the part of Alice Tripp, the frumpy factory worker whom George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) beds, though he adores Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) in A Place in the Sun (1951). Pregnant with George's child, Alice demands that he marry her, though she knows he doesn't love her. Alice understands she's the second choice, and though George abandons his plot to drown her, she falls into the shadowy water all by herself -- and he refuses to save her.

Though Winters played many different parts over her long career, it is this one -- the pathetic, lonely, doomed woman -- that crystallizes her appeal as a screen actress. In 1955's The Night of the Hunter, she was Willa Harper, a widow courted by the charming psychopath, "Reverend" Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), who schemes to steal the money her husband hid somewhere on her property. Willa, smitten and naïve, accepts his lies and his brutality, a story culminating in her murder. For a second time Winters appears in a watery grave, blonde hair swirling around her pale face. Again she has fallen in love much too quickly and fallen victim to a greedy man.

It's not surprising that Stanley Kubrick cast her as another provincial widow, Charlotte Haze, in Lolita (1962). She is, as Humbert Humbert (James Mason) describes her in his narration, "a trustful, clumsy seal." The viewer's understanding that she is misguided makes her actions all the more painful to watch. When Charlotte attempts to seduce Humbert by squeezing her matronly body into a gaudy leopard skin outfit and offering him pink champagne, her desperation seems palpable. Later, after she is hit and killed by a car, Humbert celebrates with a martini and a bubble bath, an image that underlines, again, the Winters character's victimization and our sympathy for her.

After her Oscar-winning turn as a foul-mouthed, controlling matriarch in A Patch of Blue, Winters began transitioning into a next phase. The roles for which she became famous in her middle age allowed her to inflict some gratuitous violence of her own. In Roger Corman's Bloody Momma (1970), she is deliciously over the top as the incestuous Ma Barker, giving her grown sons sponge baths and leading them on a bloody crime and murder spree, until the family is killed in a sensational finale. And in Cleopatra Jones, Winters is called simply "Mommy," a lesbian drug lord with a cadre of nubile young women whom she fondles while barking orders at underlings. Mommy's righteous nemesis, Cleopatra Jones (Tamara Dobson), kills her in a fabulous slow motion fight scene set in a junk yard. Even better, Winters is dressed in black leather.

Shirley Winters' characters embodied certain kinds of tragedy: they're scorned and murdered, abusive and homicidal. Her real life, while also turbulent, was considerably less tragic. She married three times and allegedly had affairs with everyone from Burt Lancaster to Sean Connery to Marlon Brando. Not bad for an actress whom Pauline Kael once described as "a mother hippo." Well known for her outspoken political views and for her juicy autobiographies, Winters was energetic and passionate off screen as well. Though she met any number of violent ends on screen, it is comforting to know that Shelley Winters died of natural causes at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 86 years old.