Biography
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.
Biography courtesy of the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).
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