Shelley Winters Biography

Fast Facts

• Won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hollywood Film Festival in 1998
• Donated the Oscar she won for "The Diary of Anne Frank" to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam
• Won the Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award in 1967 for Best Supporting Actress in "A Patch of Blue․"
• Awarded a Star on the Walk of Fame in 1960 for her work in motion pictures
• Won a Golden Laurel for Top Female Supporting Performance in 1960 for "The Diary of Anne Frank" and for Supporting Performance, Female, in for "A Patch of Blue" in 1966
• Made her motion picture debut in "What a Woman!" in 1943
• President of Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn saw her in "Rosalinda," an English adaptation of "Die Fledermaus," and hired her soon after
• Studied at The New School and The Actors Studio in New York City before making her film debut in 1943
• Quote: "I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn't last long․"
• Quote: "I'm a Method actress․ I find feelings of my own to correspond with what's in the script․ On stage, I look at a bottle of champagne with craving․ Inside my head, I'm thinking of a great big banana split․"
• Enjoyed a writing career later in life, as she published several autobiographies in the '80s and '90s
• Perhaps best remembered for her starring role in "A Place in the Sun" in 1951
• Began her career in the early '40s with character roles before hitting superstardom in 1947 with "A Double Life" alongside Ronald Colman, which would help her land leading roles in the 1950s
• Admitted in one of her many autobiographies that she once held affairs with numerous leading men in Hollywood including Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando and William Holden
• Friend and ordained minister Sally Kirkland recited her last rites just hours before her death in 2006
• Shared a Hollywood apartment in the late 1940s with a then-unknown Marilyn Monroe