A Winters tale

Interview, May, 1996 by Graham Fuller

Shelley Winters, or Shirley Schrift, as she was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1922, has given short shrift to indolence during her dynamic careen For over half a century, Winters has worked indefatigably, and she is a veteran of hundreds of films and plays, live television in the '50s, and Roseanne in the '90s. Longevity can sometimes dull an actor's luster, but Winters's tenure shouldn't obscure the fact that she is a great star - all the more so for playing so many slatterns, harridans, and vulgarians.

After an initial phase as a screen floozy in the '40s, Winters gravitated toward rich character parts following her success in George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951). Plain, dumb, and mousy as the pouting mill girl disposed of by Montgomery Clift so he can have Elizabeth Taylor in that film, Winters excelled amid so much dark gorgeousness; her performance set the tone for the stooges she played so brilliantly in The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Lolita (1962). In the latter, there's a scene in which Winters's Charlotte Haze, mama of the nymphet Lo, whisks Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) away from his beatnik consort on a dance floor, puncturing his phony cool. At her blowsy best, Winters had no peer at making us cringe at women like Charlotte.

Following a long stint on Broadway in the late '50s and immersion in the Method, Winters won her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar as the plump hysteric, Mrs. Van Daan, in Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); her second came for her portrayal of the ferocious bigot whose blind daughter falls in love with Sidney Poitier in A Patch of Blue (1965). Meanwhile, Winters swung with the '60s as the hungriest of Michael Caine's bed-mates in Alfie (1966), a nod to her sexpot past. A few years later, she kept The Poseidon Adventure (1972) afloat. Indeed, the S.S. Shelley Itself has never been in danger of capsizing - she can be seen next month in Heavy, and later this year in The Portrait of a Lady.

Winters has been a civil rights activist and an acting teacher. She has written two best-selling autobiographies and an Off-Broadway play. She has been married three times and is the mother of a doctor (Vittoria, from her second marriage, to Italian actor Vittorio Gassman). And, thankfully, she has never stopped talking.

GRAHAM FULLER: Let's start by talking about your early days. Your mother, Rose, was an opera singer in St. Louis, wasn't she?

SHELLEY WINTERS: Not really. She sang at silent-movie houses and won a contest to go to Italy to study. But my grandparents wouldn't let her go. Girls weren't allowed to do things like that in those days.

GF: Were there other showbiz people in your family?

SW: Yes. The love of theater was very much in the family, and I guess I eventually fulfilled it for everybody. I had one uncle who was a one-man band and another who was a great violinist - I remember sitting on the floor watching him practice. His name was Joe Winter. Winter was my mother's maiden name, and that's what I took as my stage name originally; Universal made me plural when I was working there.

GF: Did you see movies when you were a child?

SW: I remember my father taking me to see Dead End - the play - when I was very young. It was sort of an inappropriate play for a kid to see. Then I remember going with my Aunt Cecile to the Yiddish Theatre on Second Avenue [in Manhattan]. We'd left St. Louis when I was either six or nine - I'm not sure which - and I was brought up in Brooklyn. Once I found out there were stage matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I never went to school again on Wednesdays. Until about ten years ago, elderly ushers in New York would say to me, "Shirley, you paid to get in today?" because I used to go see every single play, and in those days there were maybe thirty or forty plays running in New York.

GF: And you were an usher yourself at one point.

SW: Yes, at the Lyceum, where the Group Theatre was. The first play I actually did was something called The Night Before Christmas. I couldn't go to rehearsal unless I belonged to Equity. Because I was underage, it was only twenty-five dollars to join, but it might as well have been a thousand, because I didn't have any money. One day I got an envelope with twenty-five dollars in it to get my union card. My sister got it for me. I don't know how. She was a student nurse and I think she might have sold her blood. It was a great gift.

GF: You eventually made it to Broadway in 1941 and came out to Hollywood as a Columbia contract player in 1943, but Columbia didn't use you much at first, did they?

SW: No, so I went out and got a part in Knickerbocker Holiday [1944]. So, wouldn't you know it? Harry Cohn [Columbia's fearsome chief] called me into his office and told me he was putting me in Nine Girls [1944]. In some lists it says I was in that picture, but I was-n't. I explained I couldn't do it. And he said, "What do you mean, you can't do it? You're under contract." I said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Cohn, but I've tested for a very important picture and got the part." He couldn't believe it. I didn't quite understand what being under contract meant.