Dana Wynter - Career

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, with Otto Preminger) and Studio One (1955, with Barry Sullivan), and a 1965 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "An Unlocked Window" (winner of an Edgar Award), among others.

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 in Something of Value (1957), Mel Ferrer in Fräulein (1958), Robert Wagner in In Love and War (1958), James Cagney and Don Murray in Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck! (1960), Danny Kaye in On the Double (1961), and George C. Scott in The List of Adrian Messenger (1963).

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 (which also starred a young Gabriel Byrne), from 1978-80. In 1993, she returned to television to play Raymond Burr's wife in The Return of Ironside.