Shelley Winters Net Worth

Shelley Winters was an American actress who starred in over 100 films during her career. She won two Academy Awards during her time in the business. She also had a prolific writing career and wrote two memoirs about her life in the movies and on stage. She was also known for her flamboyant personal lifestyle. She had multiple affairs with Hollywood’s leading men and regularly appeared on television talk shows telling tales of her sexual exploits.

Winters was born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis, Missouri on August 18, 1920 (some sources list her birth date as 1922). Her mother and father were Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary. Her parents were poor, and she worked as a garment cutter to support the family until she was able to act professionally.

Early in her film career, she had a series of small parts for MGM and United Artists including Susie Steps Out (1946), Abie’s Irish Rose (1946), New Orleans (1947) and Killer McCoy (1947). After appearing in several Broadway shows, she began getting more significant roles. She starred in a few musicals including The Night of the Iguana (1962) and had lead roles in films such as Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960), and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962).

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During this period, she also started to appear on television shows like the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. She became well known for her raucous antics and her willingness to take on guests whom she felt were sexist or condescending. In the 1970s, she wrote two memoirs and began appearing in off-Broadway plays. She had a series of short-lived marriages to a United States Navy serviceman, Vittorio Gassman and actor Anthony Franciosa before settling down with her longtime companion Gerry DeFord in 1981 until his death in 2006.

She continued acting into the 1980s. She guest starred in a number of TV shows and made a comeback on the big screen with roles in Looping (1981), S.O.B, episodes of The Love Boat and Renaissance, Over the Brooklyn Bridge (1984) for Menahem Golan and Alice in Wonderland for Warner Bros. She also acted in the theater productions of Witchfire and The Gingerbread Lady.

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In the 1990s, she played a restaurant owner in Heavy with Liv Tyler and Debbie Harry for James Mangold and an embittered nursing home administrator in 1999’s Gideon. She also had a recurring role as the title character’s grandmother on the sitcom Roseanne. Winters died of heart failure on January 14, 2006, in Beverly Hills, California. She was interred in Hillside Memorial Park. Hours before her death, she married DeFord in a non-denominational ceremony performed by Sally Kirkland. Kirkland was a minister of the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness and a friend of Winters’. She is survived by one daughter.