A Steady Diet of Film

Shelly Winters, you shall be missed

Shelley Winters, who once described her life as a "rocky road out of the Brooklyn ghetto to one New York apartment, two Oscars, three California houses, four hit plays, five Impressionist paintings, six mink coats and 99 films," died yesterday. She was 83, although some sources say she was 85. ...

Tough-talking and oozing sex appeal, Ms. Winters was blowzy, vulgar and often pathetically vulnerable in her early films. In movie after movie, she played working-class women who were violently discarded by men who had used them.

When her gullible waitress couldn't lead the hymn-singing preacher to a cache of stolen money in The Night of the Hunter (1955), he slit her throat.

As a rich man's poor mistress in The Great Gatsby (1949), she was casually run over by her lover's wife.

In Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962), James Mason married her to get close to her young daughter; when she finds this out she blindly runs in front of a car and is killed.

Even when she became the dominating force in many of her later movies, Ms. Winters often played vulnerable monsters. As Ma Barker in the 1970 cult classic Bloody Mama - in which she is first seen giving her four grown sons their Saturday-night baths - she was murderously maternal while brandishing a tommy gun.

Shrieking, shrewish, slutty or silly, Ms. Winters always seemed larger than life on screen. The critic Pauline Kael called her lovelorn culture-vulture Charlotte Haze in Lolita a "triumphant caricature, so overdone it recalls Blake's 'You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.' "

posted by Erin @ Saturday, January 14, 2006