Monday, November 2, 2020

TCM Star of the Month November 2020: Shelley Winters

Shelley Winters picking up her last Oscar nomination in The Poseidon Adventure (airing Nov. 30 at 8:00 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, which means it's time for the monthly programming themes on TCM to change. First up is the Star of the Month. For November, it's going to be Shelley Winters, the two-time Oscar winter who got a lot more great supporting roles than starting roles, and whose outsized style brought a lot of verve and fun to the roles she played. Her movies will be airing every Monday night in November on TCM A good example would be The Poseidon Adventure (Nov. 30 at 8:00 PM), where she plays an older woman on the doomed cruise with her husband. A lot of those roles came in the 1970s, which is the focus of the final Monday night lineup.

Winters won two Oscars, both in the Supporting Actress category. The first was for The Diary of Anne Frank (airing at 8:00 PM Nov. 16) in 1959. The second was for A Patch of Blue (airing at 1:30 AM Nov. 10 and again outside of the Star of the Month salute at 4:00 PM on Nov. 18) in 1965. Other supporting roles are in movies like Odds Against Tomorrow (Nov. 16 at 11:15 PM), and I Died a Thousand Times (overnight tonight at 1:30 AM).

But Winters' movie career started in the 1940s, and the spotlight begins tonight with a couple of those early performances. Interestingly, there are some fine early performances overlooked, such as He Ran All the Way, while Winchester '73 gets moved to a night of Shelley Winters westerns. I'm not surprised they couldn't get the Ronald Colman movie A Double Life, which I think is Universal. Also missing is Night of the Hunter.

One early performance that is showing up is in A Place in the Sun (Nov. 9 at 11:00 PM), where Winters is excellent as the grasping young woman who has a doomed relationship with troubled Montgomery Clift, which earned her her sole Best Actress nomination, losing to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire.

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