Olga Bellin

Olga Bellin, born Olga Bielinska on August 17, 1933, in Poland, was an American actress who worked across theater, television, and film. She also performed under the name Olga Winters early in her career. Bellin died on November 8, 1987, in New York City, following a cancer diagnosis approximately two years prior. She was 54 years old.

Raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Bellin attended Milwaukee-Downer College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1951. Her parents, Walter Bielinska and Helen Jarzembinski, were Polish emigrants. Between 1949 and her graduation, she performed extensively in summer stock with Milwaukee's Tower Ranch Tent-House Theatre, taking on roles including Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Kate Keller in All My Sons, Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, Mrs. Bramson in Night Must Fall, Anna Christie, Shaw's Candida, and Amanda in Noël Coward's Private Lives. After graduating, she received a scholarship to study dance with Martha Graham in New York and subsequently studied acting with Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio.

From January 1954 through approximately the following eighteen months, Bellin performed as Olga Winters in New York and Ontario, earning well-received notices in lead roles in productions including Gigi, The Philadelphia Story, The Hasty Heart, Dear Barbarians, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Canadian director and voice actor Vern Chapman, a colleague from that period, later described her as a "splendid, sensitive young actress" who could "imbue rather surface characters, as written, with a depth that made them more believable," noting that she acted "in depth without sitting around for weeks analyzing the character."

Bellin's Broadway career spanned 1955 to 1961 and included four productions: The Carefree Tree, Protective Custody, A Month in the Country, and A Man for All Seasons. In the original Broadway production of A Man for All Seasons, she portrayed Margaret Roper, née More, daughter of Paul Scofield's Thomas More. In 1962, that performance earned her the Charlotte Cushman Award as the year's best actress in a non-featured role.

Beyond Broadway, Bellin is perhaps best known for her sole feature film credit, appearing opposite Robert Duvall in Tomorrow, a screen adaptation of Horton Foote's dramatization of William Faulkner's short story from Knight's Gambit. Faulkner biographer Carl Rollyson wrote of her performance that Bellin "clearly and confidently acts the role of a proud, independent woman, who has never asked for anyone's help," and that her character's "self-reliance, suppressed tenderness, and loneliness" made the scene between her character and Duvall's Fentry "a revelation." Bellin also played the lead in HB Studio's production of The House of Mirth, adapted from Edith Wharton's novel of the same name.

In 1984, Bellin starred in the professional premiere of William Luce's one-woman play Zelda, about the later years of Zelda Fitzgerald, staged at the American Place Theater and directed by her husband. Record theater critic Robert Foldberg wrote that her "portrayal is so intensely touching that the familiar often becomes fresh" and described the performance as "sensitive but unyielding in its depiction of Zelda's mental anguish."

In May 1958, Bellin married Paul Roebling, a fellow alumnus of the Herbert Berghof Studio. The couple had one son, Kristian, also known as Kriss Roebling. Bellin was survived by her son and her husband at the time of her death. Roebling died by suicide seven years later.