Posts tagged Shelley Winters

Shelley and Burt — An Improbable Hollywood Romance.

Jan16
2013 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

He was charming and, oh, God, so handsome! And he was , I think, one of the most gracefully athletic men I’ve ever seen. Just watching him walk was almost a physical pleasure.

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here to report that the above quote — excerpted from the autobiography, Shelley Also Known As Shirley, published in 1980 — does NOT refer to either one of us.

No, it comes from Shelley Winters  and describes the guy who, one night in the late 1940′s during an elevator ride in a New York hotel, invited her to a Broadway performance of South Pacific. She accepted, and a flaming romance was born.

Burt Lancaster was in his mid-Thirties at the time, his career was very much on the rise. He also uttered these time-honored words: “My wife and I are not getting along and are discussing a separation.” 

In her late twenties, Shelley was far less known but nonetheless was quite a looker, a far cry from the overweight actress later in her career specializing in blowsy female parts. When she accepted that date with Lancaster, she was also between her first and second marriages (she had a total of four in all).

She had also had a small but key role in Ronald Colman’s 1947 Oscar winning film, A Double Life, (below) and her career was on the rise. (She professed to adore Colman but her reaction to Lancaster was entirely another matter.)

 

Back at their hotel, at the end of that long Broadway musical evening — a sumptuous dinner at the tony restaurant, Le Pavillion, following the show —  Shelley reported that I don’t know how it all happened, but all I remember is being on a blue and white bedspread on a thick white rug on the living-room floor and Burt didn’t have any clothes on and he was gorgeous and I didn’t have any clothes on and I felt gorgeous and now Gigli was singing “O Paradiso” on the phonograph.

This was not just one more Hollywood one-night stand.  Winters and Lancaster took one another very seriously.  When the actress was hit by a car (owned, as it happened, by theater magnate J.J. Shubert) and tossed six feet landing back-on-asphalt, it was Lancaster who nursed her back to health providing her tea, sugar and pain pills. He messages me gently and was so kind as he kept trying to distract me with funny stories.

While he was trying to sort out his marital problems, he installed her in a Hollywood penthouse apartment (the Villa Italia near Schwab’s drug store). A particular advantage was that the parking garage afforded him the privacy he wishes to maintain his affair. No one could see him coming or going.

This went on for some time (their affair lasted more than two years) until Winters chafed under the secrecy she was forced to maintain.  Burt (would) take me out for an early dinner because he had to get home before eight or he’d turn into a pumpkin.

Then there was the considerable pull of Shelley’s fierce ambition. Winters learned from her friend, novelist Norman Mailer, that director George Stevens was casting a key role in his classic 1951 film, A Place In The Sun, costarring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor.

Shelley set her sights on the part — that of the plain Jane working girl named Alice Tripp, who first attracts Clift’s drifter character — and went after it with the vengeance.  She lost weight, talked up director Stevens, lobbied everyone in sight. She eventually got it and her career took off, winning her her first Oscar nomination.

By this time, Winters also figured out that being the wife of a popular male movie star would not be all it was cracked up to be.  The romance with Lancaster fizzled, and soon was in the past.

Shelley’s autobiography takes us from her St. Louis beginnings as Shirley Schrift through her post-Lancaster second marriage — which turned out to be a volatile disaster — to Italian actor Vittorio Gassman. 

Read it.  It’s great fun.

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , ,

MICHAEL CAINE- ENDURING STAR

Jul12
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

THINGS YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MICHAEL CAINE BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

 

Hello everybody— Joe Morella and Frank Segers here again.

We start with this question:  is he a better writer than actor?

We’re talking about Sir Michael Caine, the veteran British screen star who also has written two excellent books about himself.  The first, a great read, is titled (naturally enough) “What’s It All About,” and came out eight years ago.  A second combination memoir-autobiography was published in 2010.

“The Elephant to Hollywood” (Henry Holt and Company, 304 pages) covers much of the same ground as Caine’s earlier book, but who cares?  His career is literally a marvelous rise to stardom against all odds, and Caine tells us all about his amazing climb with facility and skill.  A special bonus: the book had us, to coin a current movie critic cliché, laughing out loud, and often.  Highly recommended.

How much you really do know about Caine, the person, the actor? Did you know that he has appeared in some 150 movie and tv titles, mostly feature films? (At 77, he is  still going strong with several new films on the way.)

Caine’s real name is Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, and his South London birthplace was and still is known as “The Elephant and the Castle.” The name comes from a “coaching” inn for travelers that once occupied the site. As Caine makes clear in his book, The Elephant was a slum when he grew up there and is, if anything, in worse shape today.

Caine made his movie debut  in 1956’s “A Hill in Korea,” later renamed “Hell in Korea.” He played one Private Lockyer.  Caine had eight lines to say but forgot every one of them. The actor’s explanation: he was a bundle of nerves during shooting, “and it didn’t help to overhear one of the cameramen muttering, ‘It’s only one fucking line.’”

Caine’s career breakthrough was 1964’s “Zulu,” a historical drama set in the late 19th century about wildly outnumbered British officers under attack by Zulu warriors. Caine was cast as a “posh,” that is, an aristocratic British officer, Lt. Gronville Bromhead. When director Cy Enfield told Caine he had the part, the actor “threw up all over my shoes.” It was, Caine said, “the best piece of luck I have ever had in show business.”

Caine did a fair amount of stage work prior to and after landing his first movie part, but he appeared in only one Shakespearean role, as Horatio in a 1963 production of “Hamlet.” The title role was played Canadian-born Christopher Plummer.

Caine’s favorite of his films is “Zulu.” Second is 1965’s “The Ipcress File,” in which Caine received his first above-the-tile movie credit. (Said producer Harry Salzman, “If I don’t think you’re a star, who the hell else will?”) Third was, what else, “Alfie,” which won Caine his first Oscar nomination.

No, Caine did not have an affair with Shelley Winters during the making of 1966’s “Alfie.” In fact, the two didn’t communicate especially well during shooting. Writes Caine: “Shelley Winters told me that (because of the Cockney playboy title character’s heavy accent) she hadn’t understood a single thing I’d said to her … and had resorted to just watching my lips to know when to come in on cue.”

As for the “What’s It All About Alfie?” song by Burt Bacharach, played over the movie’s closing titles, it was written long after production and only after the composer saw “Alfie” in an American preview.

 


Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , ,