Shelley Winters

She married four times in her life. Her first marriage was with Captain Mack Paul Mayer (January 1, 1942 to October 1, 1948).

Thereafter she got married to Vittorio Gassman (April 28, 1952 to June 2, 1954) with whom she had one child, Vittoria (born on February 14, 1953).

Her third marriage was with Anthony Franciosa (May 4, 1957 to November 18, 1960).

She was born Shirley Schrift on August 18, 1920, in St. Louis, Missouri, to the Jewish family of Jonas Schrift and Rose Winter Schrift. Her father was an Austrian immigrant who was by profession a tailor’s cutter for men’s clothing and her mother, born in Missouri to Austrian immigrants, was an aspiring opera singer.

When she was three years old, her family relocated to Brooklyn, New York. She attended ‘The New School’ in New York City. Her interest in acting was quite palpable from her early days when she used to perform in high school plays.

A personal adversity cropped up in her childhood when her father faced a prison sentence due to an arson charge which he did not commit. Although her father was later acquitted, the incident left a deep impact in her.

In 1938 a casting call for the leading role of ‘Gone With the Wind’ was being conducted in New York. Winters attempted but failed to grab the role. It was then that the auditioning director George D. Cukor advised her to complete her schooling and take acting lessons.

While still in her teens she worked in several places to pay for her acting classes, which she attended at night. She became a model, worked as a Woolworth's store clerk, nightclub chorine and as borscht belt vaudevillian.

She made her onstage acting debut in the late 1930s first with off-Broadway play and then with Broadway plays like ‘The Time of Your Life’ (1939-41) and ‘The Night Before Christmas’ (1941).

By such time she adopted the stage name Shelley Winter (without the ‘s’) inspired by noted poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her mother, Rose Winter. The last ‘s’ is said to have been added later by ‘Universal Pictures’ after she landed up with a new contract with the studio. Thereafter she used the name Shelley Winters.

Her onstage career picked up momentum after she landed up with the comedic part of Fifi in Max Reinhardt directed ‘Broadway’ play ‘Rosalinda’ that premiered at the 44th Street Theatre on October 28, 1942, and closed after 611 performances on January 22, 1944. While performing in the show, she was spotted by President of ‘Columbia Pictures’ Henry Cohn and soon she was hired by the studio.

She relocated to Los Angeles where she began working with the ‘Columbia Pictures’ as a contract performer with a weekly income of $100. In 1943 she made her debut into films with an uncredited and trivial role of a secretary in the black-and-white romantic comedy ‘What a Woman!’.

Thereafter she did several tit-bit roles mostly uncredited in films like ‘Tonight and Every Night’(1945), ‘Two Smart People’ (1946) and ‘The Gangster’ (1947) before landing up with the role of a waitress Pat Kroll in the critically acclaimed film noir ‘A double Life’ (1947) directed by George Cukor. Her remarkable characterisation in the film earned her a contract with ‘Universal Pictures’, a significant move that opened a new chapter in her film career and paved her way for better opportunities.