Dana Wynter Movies and Career Information

Dana Wynter (born Dagmar Winter; 8 June 1931) is a German-born English actress, who was brought up in England and Southern Africa. She appeared in film and television for more than forty years beginning in the 1950s, most notably in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Wynter was born as Dagmar Winter in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of Dr. Peter Wynter (né Winter), who was a noted British surgeon, and his wife, Jutta Oarda, who was Hungarian. She grew up in England. When young Dagmar was sixteen years old her father travelled to Morocco to operate on a woman who would not 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. Dana Wynter (as she called herself) would later enroll at South Africa's Rhodes University (the only female in a class of 150) and dabbled in theatre, 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, she returned to England and shifted gears, dropping her medical studies and turning to an acting career. Her film name, Dana, is pronounced "Donna". Wynter