Dana Wynter

Dana Wynter (8 June 1931 – 5 May 2011) was a German-born English actress, who was raised in England and Southern Africa. She appeared in film and television for over forty years beginning in the 1950s, her best known film being Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Early life

Wynter was born as Dagmar Winter[4] in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of Dr. Peter Wynter (né Winter), a British surgeon, and his wife, Jutta (née Oarda), a native of Hungary. She grew up in England. When she was sixteen years old her father went to Morocco to operate on a woman who would not allow anyone else to attend her. He visited friends in Southern Rhodesia, fell in love with it and brought his daughter and her stepmother to live with him there.

Dana Wynter (as she called herself, pronounced as Donna) later enrolled at South Africa's Rhodes University (the only female student in a class of 150) and dabbled in theatre, playing the blind girl in a school production ofThrough a Glass Darkly, in which she claimed to be "terrible". After more than a year of studies, she returned to England, dropped her medical studies and turned to acting.

Career

Wynter began her cinema career at 21 in 1951, playing small roles, often uncredited, in British films. One such was Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951) in which other future leading ladies, Kay Kendall, Diana Dors and Joan Collins played similarly small roles. She was appearing in the play Hammersmith when an American agent told her he wanted to represent her. She was again uncredited when she played Morgan Le Fay's servant in the MGM film Knights of the Round Table (1953). Wynter left for New York on 5 November 1953, Guy Fawkes Day (which commemorates a failed attempt in 1605 to blow up the Palace of Westminster). "There were all sorts of fireworks going off," she later told an interviewer, "and I couldn't help thinking it was a fitting send-off for my departure to the New World."

Wynter had more success in New York than in London. She appeared on the stage and on TV, where she had leading roles in Robert Montgomery Presents (1953), Suspense (1954), Studio One (1955), and a 1965 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ("An Unlocked Window"; winner of an Edgar Award).

She relocated to Hollywood where, in 1955, she was placed under contract by 20th Century Fox. In that same year, she won the Golden Globe award for Most Promising Newcomer, a title she shared with Anita Ekberg and Victoria Shaw. She graduated to playing major roles in major films. She co-starred with Kevin McCarthy, Larry Gates, and Carolyn Jones, playing Becky Driscoll in the original film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

She starred opposite Robert Taylor in D-Day the Sixth of June (1956), alongside Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier inSomething of Value (1957), Mel Ferrer in Fräulein (1958), Robert Wagner in In Love and War (1958), James Cagney andDon Murray in Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), and the last of her 20th Century Fox contract roles opposite Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck! (1960).

She then starred opposite Danny Kaye in On the Double (1961), and George C. Scott in The List of Adrian Messenger(1963). In shooting two films in Ireland, she made a second home there with her husband, Hollywood divorce lawyer Greg Bautzer. Over the following twenty years, she appeared as a guest star in dozens of television series and in occasional cameo roles in films such as Airport (1970). She appeared as various British women in the ABC television series Twelve O'Clock High (1964-66). In 1966-67, she co-starred with Robert Lansing (who had been the original star of Twelve O'Clock High) on the television series The Man Who Never Was, but the series lasted only one season. She guest starred in 1969 on the second version of The Donald O'Connor Show. She appeared in an Irish soap opera, Bracken (1978-80). In 1993, she returned to television to play Raymond Burr's wife in The Return of Ironside.

Personal life

In 1956, Wynter married celebrity attorney Greg Bautzer; they divorced in 1981. She and Bautzer had one child — Mark Ragan Bautzer, born on 29 January 1960. Wynter, once referred to as Hollywood's "oasis of elegance," divided her time between her homes in California and Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland. An anti-apartheid advocate, she refused to open a performance center because she discovered that black and white children would have to attend on alternate days. She also planned to make a film criticizing the policy, which was to have been written by an American and filmed in Australia.

In the late 1980s, Wynter authored the column "Grassroots" for the newspaperThe Guardian in London.[10] Writing in both Ireland and California, her works concentrated mainly on life in both locations leading her to use the titles Irish Eyesand California Eyes for a number of her publications.

July 2008 saw Wynter involved in a legal dispute over the proceeds of the sale of a €125,000 Paul Henry painting, Evening on Achill Sound. The painting, which hung in the family home in County Wicklow, was said to have been bought for her in 1996 by her son, Mark Bautzer, as a gift. The dispute was resolved in the High Court in 2009.

Death

Dana Wynter died on 5 May 2011 from congestive heart failure at the Ojai Valley Community Hospital's Continuing Care Center; she was 79 years old. She had suffered from heart disease in later years, and was transferred from the hospital's intensive care unit earlier in the day. Her son Mark said she was not expected to survive, and "she stepped off the bus very peacefully."