Shelley Winters Wiki, Biography, Age, Spouse, Height, Net Worth, Fast Facts

Shelley Winters Wiki, Biography

Shelley Winters was born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Rose (née Winter), a singer with St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre (“The Muny”), and Jonas Schrift, a designer of men’s clothing.^[1] Her parents were Jewish;^[2][3] her father migrated from Grymalow, Austria-Hungary, in what is now Ukraine, and her mother was born in St. Louis to Austrian immigrants who were also from Grymalow.^[2] Her parents were third cousins. Her Jewish education included attendance at the Jamaica Jewish Center and learning Hebrew songs at her public school. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York, when she was nine years old,^[4] and she grew up partly in Queens, New York, as well. As a young woman, she worked as a model.^[6] Her sister Blanche Schrift later married George Boroff, who ran the Circle Theatre (now named El Centro Theatre) in Los Angeles, California. At age 16, Winters relocated to Los Angeles,^[4] and later returned to New York to study acting at The New School.

Personal life

Winters was married four times. Her husbands were:

• Captain Mack Paul Mayer, whom she married on December 29, 1943, in Brooklyn.^[31] Winters and Mayer were divorced in October 1948.^[32] Mayer was unable to deal with Shelley’s “Hollywood lifestyle” and wanted a “traditional homemaker” for a wife. Winters wore his wedding ring up until her death, and kept their relationship very private.^{[citation needed]}
• Vittorio Gassman, whom she married on April 28, 1952, in Juárez, Mexico;^[33] they divorced on June 2, 1954. They had one child: Vittoria, born February 14, 1953, a physician who practices internal medicine at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was Winters’s only child.
• Anthony Franciosa, whom she married on May 4, 1957; they divorced on November 18, 1960.
• Gerry DeFord, whom she married on January 13, 2006.

Hours before her death, Winters married long-time companion Gerry DeFord, with whom she had lived for 19 years. Though Winters’s daughter objected to the marriage, the actress Sally Kirkland performed the wedding ceremony for the two at Winters’s deathbed. Kirkland, a minister of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, also performed non-denominational last rites for Winters. Winters had a much-publicized romance with Farley Granger that became a long-term friendship (according to their respective autobiographies). She starred with him in the 1951 film Behave Yourself! as well as in a 1957 television production of A. J. Cronin’s novel Beyond This Place.

Winters was a Democrat and attended the 1960 Democratic National Convention. In 1965, she addressed the Selma Marchers briefly outside Montgomery, Alabama on the night before they marched into the state capitol. She became friendly with rock singer Janis Joplin shortly before Joplin died in 1970. Winters invited Joplin to sit in on a class session at the Actors’ Studio at its Los Angeles location. Joplin never did.

Winters died at the age of 85 on January 14, 2006, of heart failure at the Rehabilitation Center of Beverly Hills; she had suffered a heart attack on October 14, 2005. She is interred at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.^[42] Her third husband, Anthony Franciosa, had a stroke on the same day she died, and he died five days later.

Daily Habits

Facebook, Instagram & Twitter

Net Worth

The Estimated Net worth is $80K – USD $85k.