Shelley Winters

 Shelley Winters (August 18, 1920 – January 14, 2006)

She appeared in dozens of films, as well as on stage and television, her career spanned over 50 years until her death in 2006. Winters won Academy Awards for The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue, and received nominations for A Place in the Sun (Best Actress) and The Poseidon Adventure (Best Supporting Actress). She also appeared in such films as The Big Knife, A Double Life, Lolita, The Night of the Hunter, Alfie and Pete's Dragon. Her first movie was What a Woman! (1943). Working in films (in mostly bit roles) through the 1940s, Winters first achieved stardom with her breakout performance as the victim of insane actor Ronald Colman in George Cukor's A Double Life, in 1947. She quickly ascended in Hollywood with leading roles in The Great Gatsby (1949) with Alan Ladd and Winchester 73 (1950), opposite James Stewart. Her performance in A Place in the Sun (1951), a departure from the sexpot image that her studio, Universal Pictures, was building up for her at the time, first brought Winters her acclaim, earning a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Throughout the 1950s, Winters continued in films, including Meet Danny Wilson (1952) as Frank Sinatra's leading lady, most notably in Charles Laughton's 1955 Night of the Hunter, with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish, and the less successful I Am a Camera starring opposite Julie Harris and Laurence Harvey. She also returned to the stage on various occasions during this time, including a Broadway run in A Hatful of Rain, in 1955–1956, opposite future husband Anthony Franciosa. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The Diary of Anne Frank in 1960, and another award, in the same category, for A Patch of Blue in 1966. She donated her Oscar for The Diary of Anne Frank to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Winters gained significant weight later in life, but lost much of it for (or before) an appearance at the 1998 Academy Awards telecast, which featured a tribute to Oscar winners past and present. She appeared alongside an array of former winners, including Gregory Peck, Claire Trevor, Jennifer Jones, and Luise Rainer.

Audiences born in the 1980s knew her primarily for the autobiographies and for her television work, in which she played a humorous parody of her public persona. In a recurring role in the 1990s, Winters played the title character's grandmother on the ABC sitcom Roseanne. Shelley Winters died at the age of 85 on January 14, 2006, of heart failure at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills. She is buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, CA. Her third former husband, Anthony Franciosa, had a stroke on the day of her death, and died five days later.