MY LIFE IN 10 Pictures
“I am always searching for the next door, the next role, the next change.” — Debra
BORN IN Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Debra Lynn Winger didn’t intend to be an actress. “I actually wanted to go into criminal rehabilitation and counseling,” she said. But an accident at 17 that left her momentarily blind, partially paralyzed and confined to a hospital for months changed her mind. “It’s a mortality sandwich and you have to eat it. I basically said, ‘Oh, I better do what my deepest dreams are.’ ” And through Oscar nods for An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment and Shadowlands, famous on-set battles and becoming the face of the doc Searching for Debra Winger, she’s done just that — even if it meant taking a hiatus from Hollywood for other dreams and pursuits such as being a wife and mother, author, teacher and advocate. And, Debra, who turns 65 on May 16, wouldn’t change a thing. “I don’t know what regret looks like, because how would I be here today…with the family I have and all the beautiful moments in my life without everything being exactly as it was?”
1976 NO WONDER “I saw that you get into the kind of image trip that really gives me stomach cramps,” she said of her early role as Wonder Girl on TV’s Wonder Woman. “Real ‘heroes’ I know are women who would not get called heroes. They are deeply flawed, and what’s within that human spectrum — feeling weak, crying, messing up, being angry — is more exciting to me.”
1980 GOING COUNTRY “I understood the whole thing: her womanhood, the redneck thing, the kind of shame that leads you to do stupid things for love, the tough veneer she had,” Debra explained of auditioning for her star-making turn in Urban Cowboy. “I just believed I was going to get the part, so before [the producers] said anything, I got in my car, drove to Pasadena, and got a job waitressing at [the honky-tonk bar] Gilley’s.”
1982 CARRY ON “If a guy carries his girlfriend out of the theater because of it, then bravo. One less girl walking to a parking lot,” quipped Debra about her hit film An Officer and a Gentleman with Richard Gere. “But the making of it was treacherous. I don’t need much when I’m making a movie, but I do need respect, and I didn’t get it.”
1983 COMING TO TERMS She doesn’t deny “sparring back and forth” with co-star Shirley MacLaine on Terms of Endearment, but Debra still liked “what the film said about mother-daughter relationships. In my own life I’ve done some reckless things, and yet my mother’s door was always open to me. That’s unconditional love. And we spend the rest of our lives searching for that in a relationship.”
1986 LEGAL TROUBLE She liked Robert Redford on Legal Eagles, but was “horrified to see it edited with a chainsaw. As a writer friend of mine said, [it] is the kind of film that takes audiences and shakes them up until $6 falls out of their pockets. I felt like a slice of rye in a loaf of Wonder Bread.”
1993 EQUAL TIME “I had this reputation for being ‘difficult,’” Debra admitted. “But would a man have suffered the same accusation? He would probably have been admired for speaking his mind and be called a‘perfectionist.’” t, Shadowlands ector Richard enborough could ppreciate the ference…. [He] ated myself and nthony] Hopkins equals.”
1995 FORGET IT After making the comedy Forget Paris with Billy Crystal, Debra famously left Hollywood. “I had a new marriage, I wanted another child and it seemed ridiculous to run off for three months to do another film. I had also reached 40, a point in life when things can get really tough in Hollywood. I looked around and thought: It’s time to go.”
2001 LABOR OF LOVE For Big Bad Love, Debra returned to work opposite her husband, Arliss Howard, who also made his directing debut. “I’ve always felt like the movie and the making of it was just an extension of a conversation we were having pretty much from the moment we met — and that’s the truly impossible nature of being with another human being.”
2012 NEW STAGE “I always wanted to be shot out of a cannon and land in a bucket,” she joked of her Broadway debut in The Anarchist. “But when you get an offer from [playwright] David Mamet [and] you’re gonna work with someone like Patti LuPone, if you say ‘no,’ you pretty much have to face the fact that you don’t want to do this anymore.”
2016 RANCH DIP “When I pop my head up like a groundhog every seven years or so, in each thing I do, I do try to infuse that thing that lit me up years ago,” said Debra, who relished doing a sitcom like Netflix’s The Ranch. “There’s something to getting to this time in your life and saying, ‘Wow, I’ve never done that before.’ Scary is good. Scary’s my muse.”