The actress, perhaps best known for roles in Alfie and The Poseidon Adventure, died of heart failure early yesterday at a hospital in Beverly Hills, California, where she was admitted three months ago after suffering a coronary.
Winters had a varied career sustained over six decades by repeatedly reinventing herself from nightclub chorus girl to Hollywood sexpot through to Roseanne Barr’s grandmother in the 1990s sitcom Roseanne.
She won two Oscars though is perhaps best known for her role as Belle Rosen in the 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure, for which she was Oscar-nominated. British cinema fans will also remember her as Ruby, Michael Caine’s rich older woman in the original version of Alfie.
The first of her two Academy Awards for best supporting actress came in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank, in which she played Petronella Van Daan, one of eight Jewish refugees whose life in hiding was chronicled in the diary. In 1965 she won an Oscar for her role in A Patch of Blue, in which she played a bigoted mother who tried to part her blind daughter from the kindly black man she had befriended.
Outspoken, with a keen social conscience, she donated her first Oscar statuette to the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam. Other notable film credits include A Place in the Sun, The Night of the Hunter and the 1962 version of Lolita.
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Her tendency to speak her mind on social and political issues made her a favourite of the US television talk show circuit. She famously clashed with Oliver Reed on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1972.
Reed, fired up with green room hospitality, was outlining his chauvinist views on women. They had a heated exchange after which she stormed off the set, returning with a champagne bucket full of iced water which she proceeded to dump over Reed’s head. He then tried to attack her and was hauled off by studio technicians as the urbane Carson was left dumbfounded and the show cut to commercials.
That frankness was also evident in her two autobiographies published during the 1980s in which the thrice divorced actress told of her romances with Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Robert Mitchum and other leading men of Hollywood’s golden age.
Winters was born Shirley Schrift in East St Louis, Illinois, but raised in Brooklyn, New York, in an impoverished family which necessitated her selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door at the age of nine.
She excelled in high school plays, and served her apprenticeship on Broadway as a chorus girl and in plays and musicals in holiday resorts in the Catskill mountains outside New York. To finance her studies at the Actor’s Studio drama school she modelled, later returning as a star to teach.
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She shared an apartment with Marilyn Monroe, teaching her to tilt her head back, keep her eyes lowered and her mouth partly open for a provocative delivery.
Her wit included the advice that “the best way to find out about a man is to have lunch with his ex-wife”. She is survived by a daughter.