Shelley Winters (born August 18, 1920) is an American actress.

Born Shirley Schrift to Jewish parents - Jonas Schrift (an immigrant) and Rose Winter (who was born in America) - in East St. Louis, Illinois. She is known to today's audiences as a large figure of comedians' scathing humor (especially for her obesity in the film The Poseidon Adventure), but when she began her career, she was known as a voluptuous beauty. Also, she has lost a lot of weight since the early 1990s. She is said to have had an affair with Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., father of President John F. Kennedy, as well as with many Hollywood-based attractive men, including the late actor William Holden, with whom she kept her yearly rendezvous, and of whom she wrote in her autobiography, and the young Burt Lancaster and fellow heavyweight Marlon Brando.

Her first movie was What a Woman! in 1943. In 1959, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Diary of Anne Frank and another for A Patch of Blue in 1965. Notable later roles included her turn as the once gorgeous, alcoholic former starlet "Fay Estabrook" in Harper (1966) and in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) as the ill-fated "Mrs. Emmanuel Rosen", for which she received her final Oscar nomination. In a recurring role in the early 1990s, Winters played the title character's grandmother on the ABC sitcom Roseanne, which had the bizarre effect of making her play Estelle Parsons' (who played Roseanne's mother) mother, although Parsons is only 7 years younger, and looks about the same age as Winters.

Winters dies January 14, 2006. She had been hospitalized since suffering a heart attack in October, 2005.