What a woman!
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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Shelley Winters, one of Hollywood's last survivors from the Golden Era, passed away on January 14
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REINVENTION MANTRA Shelley Winters morphed skilfully from a blonde bombshell to become a powerful character actress
She began her screen career with a tiny part in a 1943 film presciently entitled What a Woman! and her final bow on the big screen, came in the 1999 film La Bomba, an Italian comedy about American Mafiosi, where she stars opposite her former husband Vittorio Gassman.
In between Shelley Winters morphed skilfully from a `blonde bombshell' of the 1940s and 50s to become a powerful character actress, known for her often shrieking, shrewish presence that mirrored her larger-than-life presence off-screen. In a career spanning over 50 years, made about 130 films. In her eighties she jokingly spoke of herself as a `senior citizen-sex bomb' and last week, on January 14 when she died of heart failure, no one was sure whether she was 83 or 85 years old.
Lifetime role
That might not matter to her many fans in India who still recall her most memorable role in living memory, as the overweight, middle-aged, former swimming champ in the1972 film The Poseidon Adventure who gives up her life to save fellow passengers in the ocean liner than turns topsy turvy. The studio made her put on 15 kgs for the role - and she could never get her weight down later. But in a sentence which endeared her to fat people everywhere, she says, as she swims frantically through the doomed ship: "In the water, I'm a very skinny lady!"
Shelley Winter's big break came in 1947 when she played opposite Ronald Colman in A Double Life as the mistress of an actor who is so obsessed with the Shakespearian character Othello that he murders his lover. In the over wrought 1951 film, A Place in the Sun, she severely deglamourised to play the role of a factory worker, killed by Montgomery Clift so that he could marry Elizabeth Taylor. The Great Gatsby and The Big Knife were her other big films of the 1940s and 50s. But for her later triumphs she had to forego her sexy persona and reinvent herself as a strong character player. As the mother of Dutch Jew hiding from the Nazis in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); as the hard hearted mother of a blind white girl who falls for a black man in A Patch of Blue (1965) - both performances winning her Best Supporting Actress Oscars - as a lusty companion of Michael Caine in Alfie (1966) and as the murderous mother of four gangsters in Bloody Mama (1970).
Away from the screen, her life was equally tempestuous - and in two "tell-all" autobiographies, she revealed her many affairs with Hollywood hunks who ranged from Errol Flynn and Clark Gable to Burt Lancaster and William Holden.
She still got over 1,000 letters of fan mail till her last years - and as she told The New York Times, Shelley helped her fans maintain the illusion of the earlier, sultrier Shelley, by "sending them a postcard of myself in short hair... taken 50 years ago".
That may still be the best way to recall with pleasure, the smouldering screen presence that was Shelley Winters.
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