Shelley Winters (August 18 1920 - January 14 2006) was a American actress who won Academy Awards for her supporting roles in The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue, and a Golden Globe Award for her role in The Poseidon Adventure. She appeared in dozens of films as well as on stage and television.

One of the most respected actresses of the golden age of Hollywood. Although she didn't have stunning looks, she competed against the best of them. She proved to everyone that great work would never go unnoticed. She wrote several "tell all" biographies that ruffled a few feathers throughout the industry. She was known for being very vocal about her opinions, even if that means offending a few people. She studied at The Actor's Studio in New York.

According to Hollywood folklore, Shelley Winters was one dame who knew how to take the ball and run with it. This gutsy, uncompromising, overzealous film star who was prone to playing the game of Hollywood while exposing it at the same time, never apologized for any of it. While her on-camera and off-camera antics remained just thisside of cheesy, her later audiences for the most part loved the way she flaunted her garish characters who were often created from her own in-bred audacity and frankness. Shelley Winters was born Shirley Schrift of very humble beginnings on August 18, 1920 (some sources list 1922) in East St Louis, Illinois. Her father moved the family to Brooklyn when she was still young so that he, a tailor's cutter, could find steadier work closer to the city's garment industry. An unfailing interest in acting happened quite early for Shelley, who initially appeared in high school plays. By her mid-to-late teens she had already been employed as a Woolworth's store clerk, model, borscht belt vaudevillian and nightclub chorine, all in order to pay for her acting classes. During a nationwide search for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), she was advised by auditioning director George Cukor to get acting lessons, which she did. Apprenticing in summer stock, she made her Broadway debut in the short-lived comedy "The Night Before Christmas" in 1941 and followed it with the operetta "Rosalinda" (1942) initially billing herself in both shows as Shelley Winter (without the "s"). Within a short time, Shelley was pushing for a career out west in Hollywood but it proved to be quite a tough road. Toiling in a number of bit or unbilled roles for years, many of her scenes were excised altogether during her early days. Obscurely used in such movies as What a Woman! (1943), Racket Man, The (1944), Cover Girl (1944) and Tonight and Every Night (1945), her breakthrough did not occur until 1947 and it happened on both the stage and big screen. Not only did she win the replacement role of Ado Annie Carnes in "Oklahoma!" on Broadway but around the same time she scored excellent notices on film for her party girl waitress who ends up a victim of deranged strangler (and Oscar winner) Ronald Colman in the critically-hailed Double Life, A (1947) directed by Cukor. From this Shelley went on to achieve earthy film stardom as both a second-lead dame who often met an untimely end in such movies as Cry of the City (1948) and Great Gatsby, The (1949), and as a tawdry black stockings-and-feather boa lead, notably South Sea Sinner (1950), in which her eclectic co-stars included Macdonald Carey and Liberace (I)! As a tarnished glamour girl and symbol of working class vularity in Hollywood, Shelley was just about to be written off in pictures when one of her finest movie roles arrived on her front door. Her best hard luck girl storyboard came up in the form of the depressed, frumpy-looking Alice Tripp, a factory girl seduced and abandoned by wanderlust Montgomery Clift in Place in the Sun, A (1951). Favoring instead gorgeous society girl Elizabeth Taylor (I), who is totally out of his league, Clift is subsequently blackmailed by Winters' pathetic (and now pregnant) character into marrying her and restoring her honor. For her desperate efforts, she is purposely drowned by Clift after he tips their canoe. The role, which garnered Shelley her first Oscar nomination, finally plucked her out of the sordid starlet pool and into the ranks of serious femme star contenders. But not for long. Tough, Brooklyn-raised Shelley could not escape the lurid bottle-blonde quality she instilled in her characters. During what should have been her peak time she was unfortunately misguided into a host of badly-scirpted "B" films. Playing way too many two-dimensional chorines, barflies, floozies and saloon girls for her own good, film titles such as Behave Yourself! (1951), Frenchie (1950), Playgirl (1954) and Mambo (1954), which co-starred second husband Vittorio Gassman, pretty much said it all. Shelley grew extremely disenchanted and decided to return to dramatic study. Earning membership into the famed Actor's Studio, she became quite the exponent of Lee Strasberg's "Method" acting technique. On Broadway, Shelley earned kudos and reestablished her reputation as a strong actress with the drug-themed play "A Hatful of Rain" (1955). Co-starring in the show was the up-and-coming hunk Anthony Franciosa (I), whom she took as her third husband in 1957. Shelley's renewed dedication to pursuing quality work came by her appearances in a number of heavyweight theater roles including Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1955). In later years, the Actors Studio enthusiast became one of its most respected coaches. She proved instrumental in shaping up a number of today's fine talent. By the late 1950s Shelley had started growing in girth and wisely eased into colorful character supports. The switch paid off. After a sterling performance as the ill-fated wife of sadistic killer Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, The (1955), she scored big in the Oscar department when she won "Best Supporting Actress" for her shrill and hypertensive role of Mrs. Van Daan in Diary of Anne Frank, The (1959). From this period sprouted a host of bad mamas, blowsy matrons, and grotesque madams in such film fare as Lolita (1962), Chapman Report, The (1962), Balcony, The (1963) Wives and Lovers (1963), and House Is Not a Home, A (1964). She topped things off as the vitriolic prostie mom in Patch of Blue, A (1965). Despite the revolting nature of her character, who was not above pimping her own blind daughter (the late Elizabeth Hartman (I)) for household money, Shelley managed to place a second Oscar on her mantle for her startling and riveting support work. With advancing age and increasing size, Shelley found a comfortable niche in the harping Jewish wife/mother category with loud, flashy, unsubtle roles in Enter Laughing (1967), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) and, most notably, Poseidon Adventure, The (1972). She earned another Oscar nomination for "Poseidon" while portraying her third drowning victim. At the same time she scored quite well as the indomitable Marx Brothers' mama in "Minnie's Boys" on Broadway in 1970. In the 1970s and 1980s, Shelley developed into a gabby, blatant and oddly-distracted personality on TV, making countless talk show appearances and becoming quite the raconteur and namedropper with her juicy tales of Hollywood-behind-the-scenes. Candid would be an understatement when she published two scintillating tell-all autobiographies that reached the best seller's list: "Shelley, Also Known as as Shirley" (1981) and "Shelley II: The Middle of My Century" (1989) which detailed her notorious dalliances with such famous movie stars as Errol Flynn (I), Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, William Holden (I), Sean Connery and Clark Gable, to name a few. Thrice divorced (her first husband was a WWII captain, while her only child, Vittoria, came from her second union to Italian stallion Gassman), Shelley remained footloose and fancy free after finally breaking it off with the volatile Franciosa in 1960. Her stormy marriages and notorious affairs, not to mention her ambitious forays into politics and feminist causes, kept her name alive for decades. She worked in films until around the beginning of the millennium, her last film being the easily-dismissed Italian feature Bomba, La (1999). She also enjoyed her Emmy-winning TV work and had the recurring role of Roseanne's tell-it-like-it-is grandmother on the comedienne's self-styled sitcom. Shelley's last years were marred by failing health and, for the most part, was confined to a wheelchair in her final years. Suffering a heart attack in October of 2005, she died in a Beverly Hills nursing home of heart failure on January 14, 2006. Only hours earlier on her deathbed she had entered into a spiritual, if not legal, union with her longtime companion of 19 years, Gerry McFord. Gregarious, ambitious and completely unpredictable, Shelley's amazing career lasted over six colorful decades.