She had three great careers in the movies. The first was as a sexy blonde siren in a string of films of the '40s; the second a respected character actress that bagged her two Academy Awards in the '50s and '60s (The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue); and the third was a blowzy, over-the-top performer in some campy horror films and blaxploitation flicks in the '70s. If you take it all in stride, Shelly Winters achieved something in this business that's rare - longevity. Sadly, she died of heart failure on January 14 at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills where she had been hospitalized in October after suffering a heart attack. She was 85.

She was born Shirley Schrift on August 18, 1920, in East St. Louis, Illinois but grew up in Brooklyn. Like most youngsters who came of age during the Great Depression, she lived in near poverty and found comfort spending all of her time at the movies. She worked as a chorus girl and garment district model to help finance her dramatic studies. She soon found work in the famed Borscht Belt Circuit of the Catskill mountains. There, she gained confidence and experience working in both plays and musicals, developing her skills in drama, comedy and song.

Winters was appearing in the Broadway hit Rosalinda when Columbia Pictures offered her a two-year contact and a new name - Shelley Winters. This early stage of her career consisted of little more than the actress looking gorgeous in small parts in a few good films: What a Woman! (1943), Knickerbocker Holiday, Cover Girl (1944), and Tonight and Every Night (1945). When her contract finished, Winters returned to Broadway in 1946 as Ado Annie in Oklahoma!.

Her success from that stage hit brought Winters back to Hollywood on a much more notable scale. She signed a seven-year contract at Universal and soon gained some roles that showed off her true acting ability: the ill-fated waitress who is killed by Ronald Coleman in A Double Life (1947); Myrtle in The Great Gatsby; the witness that William Powell desperately tries to track down to clear his name in the excellent thriller Take One False Step (both 1949); a fine romantic lead opposite James Stewart in Anthony Mann's underrated Western Winchester '73 (1950), and of course, her Oscar®-nominated star turn as Alice Tripp, the plain-spoken factory girl who is accidentally drowned by Montgomery Clift in George Stevens' much acclaimed A Place in the Sun (1951).

Throughout the next two decades, Winters held her own in several movies that sharply highlighted her versatility as an actress, especially the three terrific films she made in 1955: the impressive standout in the cynical Hollywood expose The Big Knife; the lonely, naive widow murdered by preacher Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's brilliant The Night of the Hunter; and as Natalia in a fine slice of Berlin decadence - I Am a Camera. After she won the Academy Award as Petronella Van Daan, a Jewish refugee in World War II Holland who hid for more than a year in cramped quarters to avoid the concentration camps for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); she kicked off the '60s producing her most memorable work. She was heartbreaking and hilarious as a nymphet's mother, jealous of her daughter's burgeoning sexuality in Lolita (1962); a second, most deserving Oscar® as a foul-mouth, lush of a mother who tries to keep her daughter away from a black man in A Patch of Blue (1965); one of Michael Caine's sexual conquests in Alfie; and she was more than a match for private eye Paul Newman in Harper (1966).

By the '70s, Winters career took the turn that most modern audiences recognize - the heavyset, loud caricature of an overbearing matron. Critics may have not always been kind, but her fans knew Winters was hamming it up with all the camp relish that rivaled the likes of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis during their final heydays. Admit it, you couldn't resist her in any of these incarnations: the machine gun-toting, cigar-chomping Ma Barker in Bloody Mama (1970); the psychotic music teacher who stabs Debbie Reynolds to death in What's the Matter with Helen?; yet another homicidal madwoman who taunts children in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971); her fourth and final Oscar® nomination as an aquatic passenger in the grandaddy of all disaster flicks The Poseidon Adventure (1972); a big, bad mama villain in the sexy blaxploitation piece Cleopatra Jones (1973); the intrusive mother in Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976); and as a wild, super-agent in Blake Edwards' much maligned but hilarious Hollywood epic-spoof S.O.B. (1981).

Even after her film career came to a standstill, Winters was still a popular fixture on the talk show circuit. Her staggering 22 appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson during the '70s and '80s certainly were a testament to her festive, gabby personality. And she endeared herself to countless film gossip junkies with her two "tell-all" autobiographies: Shelley, Also Known as Shirley (1980) and Shelley II: The Middle of My Century (1989). Finally, Winters proved she could still mix with the best of them when she garnered a recurring role as Roseanne's grandmother on the hit series Roseanne (1991-96); and she offered a wonderfully quiet, thoughtful performance as a suffering mother who worries after her lonely, overweight son in one of her last films Heavy (1995).

Winters was briefly marred to actors Vittorio Gassman (1952-1954) and Anthony Franciosa (1957-1960). She is survived by her daughter Vittoria, a child from her marriage to Gassman.

by Michael T. Toole