Jane Winton

Biography

Statuesque, gorgeous Jane Winton was billed as the "Green-Eyed Goddess of Hollywood". The former Ziegfeld Follies dancer appeared in a good number of films from 1925--if not as the nominal star, then at least very high up on the list of credits. Her aloof beauty was tailor-made for playing patrician socialites, and she breezed through many such roles in both comedies and dramas. Her most famous role, ironically, was as Donna Isobel in Don Juan (1926), not because of the acting involved (although the star was John Barrymore), but because it first used the Vitaphone process to synchronize film and sound effects (though no dialogue), effectively making it a precursor to The Jazz Singer (1927), released a year later. At Warner Brothers, Jane appeared back-to-back in the period drama My Official Wife (1926) and one of the studio's most successful comedies of the year, Why Girls Go Back Home (1926), as a seductive model. She was also third-billed as the vamp rivaling Marion Davies for the affections of Johnny Mack Brown in The Fair Co-Ed (1927), and as Davies' elder sister in her biggest hit, The Patsy (1928). She had smaller roles in two A-grade productions: the classic Sunrise (1927) and the Howard Hughes-produced World War I epic Hell's Angels (1930). At the peak of her career, Jane--at her most glamorous--essayed a murder suspect in The Furies (1930), adapted for the screen by Zoe Akins. Jane's star faded abruptly after 1930. She made a few more appearances in several 17- and 18-minute mystery "featurettes" made at the Warner Brothers Vitaphone facilities in Brooklyn. In 1937 she left acting altogether. It is not entirely clear exactly what killed her career. One might logically surmise that it was the transition to sound pictures, yet the problem was not with the quality of her voice; in fact, she became a soprano of international repute, a one-time diva with the National Grand Opera Company in 1933, performing in "Pagliacci." Some years later she also sang on radio broadcasts in England. In any event, Jane went globe-trotting and devoted time to her various other talents. She was said to have been a decent painter and certainly played bridge well (a tribute to one of her three husbands, Michael T. Gottlieb, a grand master of the game). In the early 1950s, the multi- faceted Jane also wrote two novels: "Park Avenue Doctor" and the period romance "Passion is the Gale," a tale of "temptation and torment" set in the Virgin Islands, featuring pirates, damsels in distress, and other expected accouterments of the genre. Jane Winton died in 1959 at just 54. As Gloria Swanson famously said in Sunset Boulevard (1950): "There just aren't any faces like that anymore . . . ".