Actress Dana Wynter died 5 May 2011 of congestive heart failure. She was born Dagmar Winter on 8 June 1931, in Berlin, Germany, and grew up in England, before moving to Southern Rhodesia with her surgeon-father and stepmother. She won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer—Female, in 1956, and was best known for her role as Becky Driscoll in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In the film, she was the last human to succumb to the seedpod invaders. Her costar, Kevin McCarthy, died last September (see this obituary).
Wynter was a pre-med student at Rhodes University in South Africa before returning to England and turning to acting. In 1959, she told a reporter that acting “is fun and exciting, but compared to medicine it’s nothing.” Forty years later, in Starlog magazine, she described her part in the iconic film. “It was just supposed to be a plain, thrilling kind of picture. That was what Allied Artists thought they were making.… We realized… that we were making an anti-ism picture. Anti-ism—fascism, communism, all that kind of thing. We took it for granted that’s what we were making but it wasn’t spoken about openly on the set or anything like that.”
Her nearly 100 film and television appearances began with 1951’s White Corridors, and she retired after appearing on Magnum, P.I. in 1982 (although she made one more appearance, in 1993’s The Return of Ironside). Her other genre appearances include: Fantasy Island (1979), The Questor Tapes (1974), The Invaders (1967), and The Wild Wild West (1966).
Her one, 25-year marriage ended in divorce in 1981. She is survived by her son, Mark Bautzer.