Dana Wynter
| Dana Wynter | |
|---|---|
Wynter in 1962
|
|
| Born |
8 June 1931 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | 5 May 2011 (aged 79) Ojai, California, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Congestive heart failure |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1951–1993 |
| Spouse(s) | Greg Bautzer (1956–1981; divorced) 1 child |
| Children | Mark Ragan Bautzer (b. 1960) |
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 more than forty years beginning in the 1950s, her best known film being Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
Wynter was born as Dagmar Winter 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 of Through 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.
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."
...
Wikipedia