Shelley Winters has died. She’s had quite a long career, and starred in many prominent films, which I’ll leave to the newspapers to detail. For my part, I would just like to mention a few of the lesser-known highlights and my personal favorites.

A young, thin Shelley was perfect as the angelic, naive widow and mother of two small children who falls for Robert Mitchum’s murderous preacher in Night of the Hunter. It’s impossible to forget the scene where she waits for her own death in bed, or the hurt in her eyes when she realizes the mistake she has made. She played a similarly naive, but brilliantly tacky and unpleasant character in Stanley Kubrick’s underrated Lolita (well, underrated in my opinion). Later in career, Shelley had some memorable freak-out roles - as the overbearing, grasping mommy of the lead in the youth-power Wild in the Streets, tripping on LSD in a concentration camp for over-30s, and as the evil, lesbian gangster in Cleopatra Jones. She was also great in a guilty pleasure, the silly but fun Poseidon Adventure.

Shelley was a great example of an actress who really did her best with the camp roles and the B-movies later in her career, and made them better for it. More power to her.