Marian Winters papers

1936-1979

Marian Winters (1920-1978) was born Marian Weinstein on April 20th in New York City. She began acting as early as 1936 in a Carnegie Hall production of Motherly Love, and debuted on Broadway as an understudy for Frances Dee in Blithe Spirit (1945). Around this time she married Jerome H. "Jay" Smolin, an executive at NBC, to whom she remained married until her death. In 1952, Winters won a Tony award for her performance as Natalia Landauer in I Am A Camera, and her acting career continued on the stage and screen through the 1970s. She also wrote and published her own plays. Of particular note are A is for All (1968) and All is Bright (optioned 1968, performed 1970). In 1967, Winters won an Emmy for her television adaptation of Animal Keepers, one of the three one-act plays comprising A is for All. In 1976, she was meant to play Mama Kolowitz in So Long, 174th St., but her part was cut before the musical opened. Between 1977 and 1978 she collaborated with Albert Hague on the new musical A New World, which received a partially staged reading in May of 1977, but the partnership fell through in 1978 when Hague and Winters failed to reach mutually acceptable terms of collaboration. Her last role was Helga ten Dorp in Ira Levin’s 1978 production of Deathtrap. She died of cancer in New York City on November 3rd, 1978. The materials in this collection focus on Winters' stage career, to the exclusion of her roles in television. There is a special emphasis on the productions Winters created herself, the bulk of material supporting those plays she wrote or performed in. These include scripts in multiple drafts (some annotated, some used in performance) clippings, promotional material, programs, recordings, sheet music, books (some annotated), photographs, contracts, and correspondence. The collection also includes a number of portraits, three recordings of unknown contents, and seven large scrapbooks containing a variety of materials that trace the steps in Winters' theatrical career. The collection also contains some materials relevant to Winters' non-theatrical life, most notably a series on the creation of the book Catwise.