Dana Wynter biography
(b. June 8, 1930)
The daughter of a noted surgeon, Dana Wynter was born Dagmar Winter in Berlin, Germany, and grew up in England, UK. When she was 16, her father went to Morocco to operate on a woman who wouldn't 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.
Wynter later enrolled as a pre-med student at Rhodes University (the only girl in a class of 150 boys) and also dabbled in theatrics, playing the blind girl in a school production of Through a Glass Darkly in which she says she was "terrible." After a year-plus of studies, Wynter returned to England and shifted gears, dropping her medical studies and turning to an acting career. She was appearing in a play in Hammersmith when an American agent told her he wanted to represent her. She left for New York on November 5, 1953, "Guy Fawkes Day", a holiday commemorating a 1605 attempt to blow up the Parliament building.
"There were all sorts of fireworks going off, " Wynter 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, acting on TV (Robert Montgomery Presents, Suspense, Studio One) and the stage before "going Hollywood" a short time later. The willowy, dark-eyed actress appeared in over a dozen films, worked in "Golden Age" television (Playhouse 90) and even co-starred in her own short-lived TV series, the globe-trotting The Man Who Never Was. Married and divorced from hotshot Hollywood lawyer Greg Bautzer, Dana Wynter, once called Hollywood's "oasis of elegance", now divides her time between homes in California and the County of Wicklow, Ireland.
Best known as Kevin McCarthy's fellow refugee from the alien "pod people" in the classic sci-fi thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), this beautiful British brunette typically played refined, articulate leading ladies onscreen.
OTHER FILMS INCLUDE: 1955: The View From Pompey's Head; 1956: D-Day The Sixth of June; 1957: Something of Value; 1958: Fraulein, In Love and War; 1959: Shake Hands With the Devil; 1960: Sink the Bismarck!; 1961: On the Double (a refreshing switch to comedy-romance with Danny Kaye); 1963: The List of Adrian Messenger; 1968: If He Hollers, Let Him Go; 1970: Airport; 1973: Santee; 1975: Lovers Like Us; 1984: The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (telefilm).
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