Belle and Rebels

Winters’ Discontent
Shelley Winters, beloved courageous but heart attack-prone swimming yenta, has died of heart failure at the age of 85. Starting out as a sexpot, Winters eventually blossomed into an esteemed character actress, winning two Oscars. Along the way, she took enough lovers to require two tell-all autobiographies, and spanning generations of leading men, from Errol Flynn to Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable to Marlon Brando. She also had an affair with Joe Kennedy, inspiring roommate Marilyn Monroe to get to know the rest of the family. After sexed-up roles in such films as Cover Girl and Sailor’s Holiday, she began to earn more serious roles, primarily as a murder victim in such films as Night of the Hunter, A Double Life (for which her strangler, Ronald Colman, won an Oscar) and A Place in the Sun, for which she was Oscar-nominated. Winters scored a win in 1959 as Petronella Van Daan, one of the Jewish refugees in The Diary of Anne Frank, then again as a cruel mother keeping her blind daughter apart from the black man who befriended her in 1965’s Patch of Blue. Her final nomination came as Belle Rosen, with Winters acknowledging her middle-aged girth with the line, “In the water I’m a very skinny lady,” before swimming to Gene Hackman’s rescue in 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure. Pauline Kael was less impressed, noting: “Shelley Winters drowns in this movie, but not soon enough.” Other notable roles included Ma Parker on Batman, sex-crazed gang leader Ma Barker in Bloody Mama, Nana Mary, Roseanne’s grandmother and heroin kingpin Mommy in the blaxploitation flick Cleopatra Jones.

Four of us got the Gene Hackman treatment, with Winters’ death lifting the heavy metal door of failure off our seasons, with 5 points going to rookies Joe (Drop Dead, Gorgeous) and Jessica, to Warren after going 0-for-20 in 2005 and to my International House of Death, creating a 4-way tie for sixth. Much like Stella Stevens, Mark doubted Winters and dropped her from his list after picking her in 2002 and 2003.

A bad week for the Winters extended family as…

Finder of the Lost Life

Or
Game Over
(From the mind of Monty)

Or
The End of the Game
(More props for Monty)
Anthony Franciosa, hot-headed actor and ex-husband of Shelley Winters, died at 77 following a massive stroke. A master of portraying moody troubled characters, Franciosa had plenty of moody, troubled experiences from which to draw. Franciosa was the Sean Penn of his day, developing a reputation for arguments with directors and fellow actors, for sulk sessions in dressing rooms and for punching photographers. These incidents derailed a promising career that had included Tony and Oscar nominations for the stage and screen versions of A Hatful of Rain, and he ended up in European productions and television, in such duds as The Name of the Game, as a member of a publishing troika, the half-season of the TV adaptation of Matt Helm and Finder of Lost Loves, kind of a romantic Quantum Leap.

He’s Done to His Last Heartbreak

Or
In the Eternal Midnight Hour

Or
Land of 1000 Corpses
(Kudos to James)

Or
It’s Really Hard Now
Wilson Pickett, a soul music pioneer who may or may not have been one of Shelley Winters’ conquests, has died of a heart attack at 64. Pickett’s hits included “In the Midnight Hour,” “Mustang Sally,” and “Land of a Thousand Dances.” His wild off-stage behavior earned him the nickname Wicked Pickett, with arrests for shouting death threats while driving his car on the front lawn of the mayor of Englewood, NJ, for assaulting his girlfriend, for hitting an 88-year-old man while driving drunk and for carrying a shotgun in his car. Despite his wild side, a 1999 comeback merited a Grammy nomination for It’s Harder Now.

I’s Wide Shut
(Honorifics to Craig)

Or
I, Mortius
Tom Nugent, a College Football Hall of Famer credited with developing the I formation at Virginia Military Institute who probably only ever dreamed of nailing Shelley Winters, has died at the age of 92. The I formation of 5 offensive lineman, a quarterback under center and two backs in line behind him, has emerged as one of the most offensive formations in football, replacing the difficult to execute Q formation, in which two backs stand on either side of a circle of lineman and receivers. In addition to his time at VMI, he coached at Florida State (where he coached Burt Reynolds) and Maryland. He was more an innovator than an executor, compiling an 89-80-3 record over 17 seasons.