Shelley Winters

The What a Character Blogathon is an event devoted to the great character actors of classic Hollywood and the often memorable supporting roles they played throughout film history, hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken & Freckled, & Paula's Cinema Club. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the links at any of the host sites.

Does Shelley Winters get a bad rep sometimes, you think? She's a double-Oscar winner, who worked with some of the greatest stars and directors of the Old Hollywood era, and while she's probably better remembered for her roles in middle age and beyond, she was a total hottie in her youth. Yeah, she had her diva moments, but so did plenty of Old Hollywood actresses. Yeah, she made some crappy movies later in life, but she wasn't alone in that, either.

Was it her choice of roles? She had a knack for dying in the second act of lots of her best-known parts (she died at least three times by getting hit by a car!), including A Place in the Sun, one of her greatest films. I watched this one again a few months ago. When I first blogged about it, I had said that I didn't buy her relationship with Montgomery Clift. Truth is, though, I think that was more the fault of the story than the acting. Winters and Clift may seem like a mismatched pair, but they're both so excellent in their roles that it almost doesn't matter. It's also worth noting that Winters was turned down for the role at first because she was too sexy. She had to prove to director George Stevens that she could make herself look ordinary before he accepted her.

Winters seemed to specialize in playing plain-janes and/or jilted women: Sun, Night of the Hunter, Lolita, Executive Suite, etc. That, in and of itself, doesn't mean anything other than typecasting. (At this stage I should probably say that it's been a very long time since I last saw The Miracle Worker, and the one time I saw A Patch of Blue (it was my father's VHS copy), I thought it was super-saccharine.)

Was it her multiple marriages and affairs? This alone certainly does not make her unique, although the number of actors she claimed to have shagged reads like a Hollywood who's who: Brando, Holden, Connery, Lancaster and Flynn, for starters. Personally, I try not to get caught up in all of that kiss-and-tell gossip; like I said, Winters was gorgeous in her youth, and if that meant she went with a lot of actors, well, that's hardly a surprise.

Was it her always bragging about knowing Marilyn Monroe before the latter became a superstar? Gee, I dunno, I think I'd brag about that too, if I were her. I know I've told certain stories, over and over again, about encounters with certain celebrities, or people I knew in school before they became famous (mostly comics artists; I doubt you'd know their names).

Surely it's not for making a movie as cheesy as The Poseidon Adventure? People forget that she was Oscar-nominated for that, too. She gained 35 pounds for it (and by her admission, she was never able to lose it afterwards), and trained with an Olympic swim coach as well. We may look back on Poseidon now with a cynical and ironic gaze, but Winters took it as seriously as any of her other roles.

If Shelley Winters is remembered in a... campy way, or is perhaps not taken that seriously, maybe it's because the really good films from her youth aren't as well-remembered as they ought to be. And to be fair, she herself contributed to her image as a brassy, lusty broad - the kind of woman who would douse Oliver Reed with her drink on television for making fun of women's lib. The kind of woman known for saying things like, "I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn't last long." And maybe her outrageous behavior had a way of obscuring her talent at times... but she had the goods. So what does it matter how people remember her?

Next: Fred Astaire

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Films with Shelley Winters:
A Place in the Sun

Previously:
Jack Lemmon   Jean Arthur   Edward G. Robinson
Rita Moreno   Frank Capra   Bernard Herrmann

Joan Blondell   James Dean   Ethel Waters
William Powell   Tod Browning   Edith Head
Joel McCrea   Thelma Ritter   Douglas Fairbanks
Gloria Swanson   Robert Wise   Saul Bass
Ruby Dee   Vincent Price