The Sheila Variations

RIP, Shelley Winters

"I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience. "

-- Shelley Winters

Here is my favorite story about Shelley Winters.

She was in her 60s. She had already been in the business for three and a half decades, and had a career that you can only dream about. So some new up-and-coming director was interested in having her in his film, but he made a grave error (he was the source for this story, by the way - I read some interview with him - whoever he was - argh, can't remember - and he told this story. He, obviously, never forgot it, and never forgot the lessons he learned.) Anyway, here was his error: He asked her to audition. For those of you who don't know - with someone of Shelley Winter's caliber - you don't ask them to audition. Actors have refused to take parts in films where they are asked to audition. You can't get away with it when you're young and inexperienced - but someone like Meryl Streep, or Paul Newman, or Robert DeNiro ... These people don't audition. Nor should they. They have, ahem, proved themselves capable. Now all you need to do is see if they like the script, if you think you can work with them, if the schedules work out, if the salary can be negotiated ... You COURT them. You don't ask them to audition. You might take them to lunch. Or have a script meeting. But someone who has made 80 movies - you don't ask them to AUDITION. It's obvious that they can act, mkay? So it was a huge faux pas.

Winters, though, was a worker - she loved to work - and she wanted the job, whatever it was, so she went to the audition. Her career lasted five decades, people. It's really amazing. Okay, so anyway.

She walks into the director's office. She is Shelley feckin' Winters in her 60s, and we all know what that means. She is an enormous flouzy blowsy fat woman, wearing a goofy little crushed-velvet hat, a huge overcoat, and carrying a lumpy bookbag over her shoulder.

She sat down in the chair. Before the director could even say a WORD - she opened the bookbag, took out one Oscar statue and plopped it on the desk. She didn't say a word. Then she reached into the bookbag, took out another Oscar statue, and plopped it on the desk, next to the other one.

Silence.

Winters barked, "Ya still want me to audition?"

Hahahaha I love that story - it says worlds about who she was - many times obnoxious, pushy, what have you - but she was a force of nature. Oh and yeah - the director gave her the part immediately. He realized instantly that he had fucked up, that this woman didn't need to prove anything, and that he would be thrilled to have her in his project. With humor, brash force, and honesty - Winters taught him a very important lesson. I wish I could remember who it was - but he spoke eloquently of what he learned in that moment. You don't ask Shelley Winters to audition. She knows how to act, okay?

Genius.

I'm very sad about her passing. Her work ethic, her no-nonsense approach to the characters she played, her longevity, her amazing career - has always been a beacon for me. I saw Place in the Sun when I was 12 years old. She had me hooked from then on.

"I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short."

-- Shelley Winters

Alex's tribute is not to be missed.

Here is the entry for Shelley Winters from David Thomson's spectacular Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Blowsy, effusive, brash, and maternal, either voluptuous or drab, Shelley Winters is at her best when driven to wonder, "How did a girl like me get into a high-class movie like this?"

In fact, she had a very respectable New York stage training before her debut in What A Woman, followed by She's a Soldier, Too, Nine Girls, and Tonight and Every Night. She may be seen, briefly, walking across the screen in the wagon train dance sequence in Red River. But her first really worthy part was as the waitress in the Kanin/Cukor A Double Life and she featured notably in Cry of the City; Take One False Step; The Great Gatsby; Johnny Stool Pigeon; South Sea Sinner; Winchester 73; and George Stevens' A Place in the Sun, in which she is last seen hunched up in a rowing boat before Montgomery Clift's uneasy resolve drowns her.

This same vulnerability characterized Phone Call From a Stranger, The Big Knife, The Night of the Hunter, in which she is discovered on the bottom of the lake, still sitting up in a car, hair flowing like weed,

and The Chapman Report. But she is equally adept, if hard to restrain, in more domineering parts: Mambo; Executive Suite; I Am A Camera; Stevens' The Diary of Anne Frank for which she won the supporting Oscar; as Charlotte Haze in Lolita; The Balcony; A Patch of Blue and another supporting Oscar; The Scalphunters; the delicious Bloody Mama. Add to this Wellman's My Man and I; Fregonese's Untamed Frontier; Fred M. Wilcox's Tennessee Champ; Walsh's Saskatchewan; Heisler's I Died a Thousand Times; Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow; Frankenheimer's The Young Savages; Lewis Gilbert's Alfie, Barry Shear's Wild in the Streets; Curtis Harrington's Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and What's the Matter With Helen?; and Paul Mazursky's Blume in Love; and it looks a very versatile career that has never lost its sense of loudmouth fun. Not least in The Poseidon Adventure in which she asks us to believe that, as New York underwater swimming champion, she once held her breath for two minutes forty-seven seconds.

She was garrulous still in That Lucky Touch; Diamonds; a casebook Jewish mother in Next Stop, Greenwich Village; the sleazy concierge in The Tenant; Tentacles; Pete's Dragon; The Magician of Lublin; and City on Fire.

Since then she has published two lively volumes of autobiography and appeared in Elvis: The Movie; SOB; Fanny Hill; Over the Brooklyn Bridge; Ellie; Deja Vu; The Delta Force; Very Close Quarters; Purple People Eater; An Unremarkable Life; Touch of a Stranger; and Stepping Out. And on TV, as the grandmother of Rosanne.

Now eighty, she has plugged on: Weep No More, My Lady; The Pickle; Is Silenzio del Prosciutti; Backfire!; Jury Duty; Mrs. Munck; Heavy; Raging Angels; The Portrait of a Lady, in which, on screen, she was married to John Gilegud -- you see, the movies are better than life; Gideon; La Bomba.

Rest in peace, dear dear Shelley Winters. I can't thank you enough for what your acting and your career in general has meant to me. You are a true American giant, and it just won't be the same without you.

Posted by sheila