Shelley Winters Biography

Shelley Winters was a two-time ‘Academy Award’ winning American actress whose career span of over five decades saw her performing in films, television and stage with equal élan. She began her acting career onstage in the late 1930s and got her big break with Max Reinhardt directed Broadway play ‘Rosalinda’. Over the years she performed in several noted ‘Broadway’ plays like ‘Oklahoma!’, ‘A Hatful of Rain’, ‘The Night of the Iguana’ and ‘Minnie's Boys’. Her career in films started in the early 1940s that saw her initially performing trivial roles, many of which often went without any credit. More prominent roles came in the 1950s with films like ‘A Place in the Sun’, the first film that fetched her both ‘Academy Award’ and ‘Golden Globe Award’ nomination for Best Actress; ‘Executive Suite’, ‘The Night of the Hunter’ and ‘The Big Knife’. She earned her first ‘Academy Award’ for Best Supporting Actress with her outstanding performance as Mrs. Petronella Van Daan in the film ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’. She gave the statuette to Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, for the Anne Frank Museum. Her second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress came with ‘A Patch of Blue’. Her other notable films included ‘Lolita’, ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, ‘Alfie’, ‘Next Stop, Greenwich Village’, ‘Pete's Dragon’ and ‘A Double Life’.