Shelley Winters, a blond bombshell of the 1940s who evolved into a character actress best remembered for her roles as victims, shrews and matrons, died Saturday. She was 85.
Winters, the first actress to win two Oscars in the best supporting category, died of heart failure at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills, her publicist, Dale Olson, said. She was hospitalized in October after suffering a heart attack.
Actress Sally Kirkland, who was close to Winters, said she was with Winters Friday night as an ordained minister for the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness performed last rites for her.
Kirkland said she also performed a "spiritual wedding ceremony" for Winters and her life partner, Jerry DeFord. Olson said DeFord had been Winters' companion for 19 years.
"Shelley was ... an extraordinary woman with powerful charisma, enormous talent, a keen perceptive mind who lived her life and spoke of it as she saw it," singer Connie Stevens said Saturday. "She was loving fun, and I'm so glad to know her and love her as a true friend."
Kevin Thomas, a retired Times writer who had known Winters for more than 30 years, said Saturday: "Shelley was a mass of contradictions as only a Method actress can be. Nobody could be more down to earth ... but quicker to fall back on a star's perquisites. She was mercurial, adorable, infuriating, loyal, brave."
Although most sources give Winters' 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 and was born two years earlier.
A little bit Jean Harlow, a little bit Mae West, Winters was once lumped with such sexy starlets as Marilyn Monroe. But Winters from the start was willing to give up glamour for a good role. After years on studio contract playing negligible parts, she got a break in George Cukor's 1947 film, "A Double Life," in which she played a waitress who was murdered by Ronald Colman.
Four years later, she became a full-fledged star as the dowdy factory girl that Montgomery Clift lets drown to be with the beautiful, rich Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun." Winters was nominated but did not win a best actress Oscar for the portrayal.
But Winters did win in the best supporting actress category for her roles as Mrs. Van Daan in Stevens' "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959) and 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.
