| Estelle Winwood | |
 | |
| Birth: | 24 January 1883 Lee, Kent, England |
| Death: | 20 June 1984 Woodland Hills, California, USA |
| Age: | 101 years, 148 days |
| Country: |  UK  USA
|
| Centenarian | |
Estelle Winwood (24 January 1883 - 20 June 1984) was an English-American actress and centenarian who was the oldest member of the screen actor's guild at the time of her death in June 1984.
Biography[]
Estelle Winwood was born on 24 January 1883 in Lee, Hundred of Blackheath, Kent, England. She decided that she wanted to be an actress when she was five. She made her professional debut in Johannesburg at the age of 20. During the First World War, she joined the Liverpool Repertory Company before moving on to a career in London's West End.
She moved to the U.S. in 1916 and made her Broadway debut in New York City. Until the beginning of the 1930s, she divided her time between New York City and London. Throughout her career, her first love was theater; and, as the years passed, she appeared less frequently in London and more on Broadway. She appeared in plays such as A Successful Calamity (1917), A Little Journey (1918), and The Madwoman of Chaillot (1948).
Winwood's final film appearance was at age 92 in Murder by Death (1976). She played a nursemaid to Jessica Marbles. In this film, she joined other veteran actors. When she took on her final major television role in a 1979 episode of Quincy, she officially became, at age 96, the oldest actor working in the U.S. She continued making appearances until she was 100 years old. When she died at age 101, she was the oldest member in the history of the Screen Actors Guild.
Winwood was good friends with Tallulah Bankhead, who died in 1968. Bankhead, actresses Eva Le Gallienne and Blyth Daly, and Winwood were dubbed "The Four Riders of the Algonquin" in the early silent film days, because of their appearances together at the Algonquin Round Table. Winwood appeared as a character in Answered Prayers, Truman Capote's final, unfinished, thinly veiled roman à clef. In the novel, which uses her real name, she attends a drunken dinner party with Bankhead, Dorothy Parker, Montgomery Clift, and the novel's narrator, P.B. Jones.
In a 1979 interview at age 95, Winwood remarked that she smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. On her 100th birthday, Winwood was asked how it felt to have lived so long, she replied "How rude of you to remind me!" Bette Davis, a co-star from Dead Ringer, was photographed at Winwood's side on the occasion in Hollywood, California.
Winwood died in her sleep in Woodland Hills, California, USA on 20 June 1984 at the age 101 years, 148 days. She was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.
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