(CBS/AP) Shelley Winters, the forceful, outspoken star who graduated from blond bombshell parts to dramas, and twice won Academy Awards as a supporting actress, has died. She was 85.

Winters died of heart failure early Saturday at The Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills, her publicist Dale Olson said. She had been hospitalized in October after suffering a heart attack.

The actress sustained her long career by repeatedly reinventing herself. Starting as a nightclub chorus girl, advanced to supporting roles in New York plays, then became famous as a Hollywood sex symbol.

As she matured, so did her roles and acting style, CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports. She won two Academy Awards playing mothers, a bigoted one in 1965s "Patch of Blue," and her first in 1959, for one of her most famous roles, the vain Mrs. Van Daan in "The Diary of Anne Frank."

A devotee of the Actors Studio, she switched to serious roles as she matured. Her Oscars were for her portrayal of mothers. Still working well into her 70s, she had a recurring role as Roseanne's grandmother on the 1990s TV show "Roseanne."

"I am so sad. She was a great person and a genius to work with," Barr said in a statement. "We will all miss her."

Longtime friend and actress Connie Stevens called Winters "an idol of mine — and many."

She was "an extraordinary woman with powerful charisma, enormous talent and a keen, perceptive mind," Stevens said in a statement.

In "The Diary of Anne Frank," she was Petronella Van Daan, mother of Peter Van Daan and one of eight real-life Jewish refugees in World War II Holland who hid for more than a year in cramped quarters until they were betrayed and sent to Nazi death camps. The socially conscious Winters donated her Oscar statuette to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

In 1965's "Patch of Blue," she portrayed a hateful, foul-mouthed mother who tries to keep her blind daughter, who is white, apart from the kind black man who has befriended her.

Ever vocal on social and political matters, Winters was a favored guest on television talk shows, and she demonstrated her frankness in two autobiographies: "Shelley, Also Known as Shirley" (1980) and "Shelley II: The Middle of My Century" (1989).

Winters wrote openly in them of her romances with Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and other leading men. She also said after she came to Hollywood in the mid-1940s she was roommates with another rising starlet — Marilyn Monroe.

"I've had it all," she exulted after her first book became a best seller. "I'm excited about the literary aspects of my career. My concentration is there now."

Typically Winters, she also had a complaint about her literary fame: While reviewers treated her book as a serious human document, she said, talk show hosts Phil Donohue and Johnny Carson "only want to know about my love affairs."

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