Shelley Winters

Whatever Winters may have lacked in looks she made up for in presence and star quality. She specialised in big, ballsy, independent, modern women like Ruby. Her characters often knew what they wanted, though they did not necessarily get it. She was wonderful as the ill-fated landlady who woos and marries James Mason’s writer Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita, oblivious to the illicit passion brewing between Humbert and her nymphet of a daughter — until, of course, it is too late.

Sometimes her characters were deeply unattractive individuals: selfish or neurotic, though often the viewer would end up feeling sorry for them as they waded out of their depth and, unlike Ruby, ended up as victims.

Water was a recurring element in their demise. She was the girlfriend drowned by Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951); the woman whom the psychotic preacher Robert Mitchum marries, murders and consigns to the bottom of a lake in the classic The Night of the Hunter; and the overweight ex-swimming champion who rescues Gene Hackman and then expires from exhaustion in The Poseidon Adventure.

Winters could seemingly play endless variations on a theme, producing unforgettable performances in great films. There were plenty of overblown caricatures in complete rubbish too.

A prolific career included more than 100 films, numerous plays and countless television appearances, including the chat-show guest slots that seemed at times to blur the boundary between the characters she played and the actress who played them. She came across as seemingly full of confidence, but sometimes in danger of exhausting herself and her audience with anecdotes that turned into interminable rambles — suggested that, while happy enough to set out, she did not always know where she was going.

She was born Shirley Schrift, into a Jewish family in East St Louis, Illinois, in 1920, though at some point she managed to knock a couple of years off her age and reference books cite 1922. She worked as a shop assistant and chorus girl while attempting to make a career of acting, and by the early 1940s she was beginning to land roles on Broadway, appearing in the operetta Rosalinda and then taking over the role of Ado Annie in the musical Oklahoma! Her professional name of Shelley Winter combined her mother’s name with that of her favourite poet. The final “s” came later.

She made her film debut in a tiny role in the Rosalind Russell romantic comedy The Beautiful Cheat, aka What a Woman! in 1943, and appeared in more than a dozen uncredited supporting roles over the next few years. She knew Marilyn Monroe before either woman was famous and took credit for teaching her that distinctive, sexy, open-mouthed tilt of the head that they both shared.

Winters’ career took off with the role of the lonely waitress Pat Kroll in the 1947 film noir A Double Life. She begins a relationship with an actor played by Ronald Colman who, consumed by his latest role as Lear, strangles her. She brought to the role an earthy but ill-fated sensuality that she would revisit time and time again. The role of the pregnant factory girl discarded by Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951) resulted in her first Oscar nomination.

Within a few years Winters had graduated from young girlfriends to mothers, albeit one who were often still searching for true love, and with tragic results in both instances. She was also a mother in the two films for which she won Oscars, an unpleasant one in The Diary of Anne Frank and a downright racist one in A Patch of Blue, in which her blind daughter falls for Sidney Poitier without realising he is black. Winters even played a gangster mum when she took on the role of Ma Barker in Bloody Mama (1970), a lowbudget Roger Corman movie designed to cash in on the success of Bonnie and Clyde. She had already played a variation on the same real-life character, renamed Ma Parker, in an episode of Batman in 1966.

Other films include The Great Gatsby (1949), Winchester ‘73 (1950), Frenchie (1950), Executive Suite (1954), The Big Knife (1955), Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The Moving Target (1966), The Scalphunters (1968), Pete’s Dragon (1977), SOB (1981), Stepping Out (1991) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996).

To some extent her personal life mirrored those recurring screen roles of a woman forever searching for love, but never finding anything other than a fleeting romance. By the beginning of the 1960s Winters had been married and divorced three times. Her second marriage, to the Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, lasted just two years, though they had a daughter together. Her third, to Anthony Franciosa, lasted not much longer. “In Hollywood, all the marriages are happy. It’s trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems,” she said.

Her numerous lovers reputedly included Marlon Brando, William Holden, Burt Lancaster and even President Kennedy’s father.

Having piled on the pounds she became a leading character actress, never particularly choosy about roles or films. A larger-than-life character in real life, she campaigned enthusiastically for the Kennedys and had opinions on everything from gun control to sex.

Winters returned fairly regularly to Broadway, winning rave reviews as the mother of the Marx Brothers in Minnie’s Boys in 1970, but her attempt to turn herself into a playwright fared less well when the semi-autobiographical One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger attracted derisory notices at the end of that same year. It starred the young Robert De Niro, who was one of the “theatrical waifs” whom she periodically took under her wing. She also got him a role as one of her brood in Bloody Mama.

Her literary efforts met with more success when they took the form of kiss-and-tell memoirs: Shelley, Also Known as Shirley (1980) and Shelley II, The Middle of My Century (1989). By the early 1990s she had progressed to the role of grandmother, playing the recurring part of Nana Mary in the hit American sitcom Roseanne between 1991 and 1996.

She is survived by Jerry DeFord, her partner for 19 years.

Shelley Winters, actress, was born on August 18, 1920. She died on January 14, 2006, aged 85.