I have bursts of being a ‘lady’, but it doesn’t last long.
Shelley Winters (b.1920 – d.2006) was an American film, television and stage actress. Her career spanned over 50 years, and her first movie was What a Woman! in 1943. Winters won Academy Awards for The Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue, and received nominations for A Place in the Sun (Best Actress) and The Poseidon Adventure (Best Supporting Actress). In the late 1940s, she shared an apartment with another pin-up actress, Marilyn Monroe.
Winters originally broke into Hollywood films as a Blonde Bombshell type, but quickly tired of the role’s limitations. She claimed to have washed off her makeup to audition for the role of Alice Tripp, the factory girl, in A Place in the Sun. As the Associated Press reported, “although she was in demand as a character actress, Winters continued to study her craft. She attended Charles Laughton’s Shakespeare classes and worked at the Actors Studio, both as student and teacher.”
After she died, a New York Times obituary noted, “Shelley Winters turned herself into a widely respected actress who won two Oscars.”
Words and Women is a regular feature that spotlights short quotations from influential women activists, artists, and authors.
Zhēn de Gender 