Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 18, 1994 TAG: 9401180049
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Judy Gerstel KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
"Clear those ducts out," she says, still snapping. "You men don't cry enough."
Winger, a single mother with a 7-year-old son, makes grown men cry.
In the movie, showing in the Roanoke Valley at the Salem Valley 8, she plays New Yorker Joy Gresham, who brought love to the life of English author C.S. Lewis during the '50s, and then promptly was stricken with cancer. For Anthony Hopkins, playing yet another repressed Englishman, the dam finally breaks. He cries; we're flooded.
And we don't even like Winger's character all that much.
"Shadowlands" director Richard Attenborough had to fight for that. "I wanted Debra, but there were those who wanted more obvious casting, easy casting," he says, "easy in terms of everybody saying at the moment she arrived, "Oh, well, of course he'll fall in love with her.' "
"Easy" is not a word in Winger's world. "Genius," maybe. It's the word Jack Nicholson chose to describe her after they made "Terms of Endearment." "Very, very sexy and sensuous, and funny and smart" were the words co-star John Travolta used after "Urban Cowboy." "She makes you feel that there's something humming inside her," wrote Pauline Kael after "An Officer and A Gentleman."
"Bewildering" is the word Attenborough chooses. He says, "Betty [Lauren] Bacall saw `Shadowlands' last night and said it was probably the best female performance in terms of real depth and real understanding that she could recall. And I think she's right."
But easy, no. That's why Winger felt a kinship with the truth-telling, socially awkward character she plays in "A Dangerous Woman."
"I want to give irreverent answers and call a spade a spade," she says. "It's more fun. It comes out naturally. And I have a lot of energy, so it comes out fast. And I'm loud, so it comes out loud."
All morning at group interviews for "Shadowlands," it's been coming out that way.
"What makes you decide to take a role?" she's asked.
"The money," she replies. "The wardrobe. The location."
"And how did you go back in time for `Shadowlands' and adapt to being a woman of the '50s?"
"That bra can get you back there really fast," she says. "They have stitches in concentric circles. Put on one of those, it's like two B52 bombers. It's pretty impressive and I'll tell you, it helps."
Told that Attenborough called Hopkins shy, Winger explodes playfully. "That's a load of baloney. You can get sucked in by these Englishmen. They do this whole self-effacing thing. They do it about themselves and then they do it about each other and they can suck you right in."
Asked about her research for the role of Gresham, she says, "You mean like walking around in the '50s bra before I actually had to wear one?"
And the major differences between her and the character she plays in the movie?
"I don't wear that underwear," she replies. "I keep getting back to the underwear. That was very important to me . . . "
But later, in a private conversation, Winger explains, "I come out and do this how often? Not very often. I get very jumpy and that's how I get through it - I'm on, that's my survival tactic. But I just don't see how else to be.
"Because otherwise you get bogged down in the seriousness of it and I see a picture of a young woman at her mother's grave in Sarajevo and it's pretty hard for me to get too serious about this stuff."
Winger at 38 is generally regarded as quixotic, nettlesome, temperamental, brilliant, and yes, maybe even dangerous. It is, indeed, enough to make grown men weep, especially when they're directing her.
Though rumors of disruptions on any set that includes Winger are predictable, Attenborough defends her stoutly.
"Debra is hugely professional," he insists. "What she cares about is the work. And if she doesn't think the work is right, if she thinks it's going wrong or if she thinks we're being superficial or meretricious or whatever, boy, will she let you know! And you are to stand still until that is resolved. I adore that!"
And according to both Winger and Hopkins, they got along amazingly well. "There were belly laughs," she says, "and the death bed stuff was not exempt."
Winger dismisses comments about suffering from cancer twice on screen. Perhaps it's remarkable only because her demise, in "Terms of Endearment" a decade ago, was so utterly memorable.
"Unfortunately, in our world today, this is not a ridiculous coincidence," she says. "I've lost two of my dearest friends to cancer in three years and I don't want to count how many I've lost in 10 years."
One of those dear friends was James Bridges, who directed her in "Urban Cowboy," the movie that put Winger, a Jewish girl from Cleveland, on a mechanical bull and made her a star.
Within three years, she was nominated twice for Best Actress Oscars - in 1982 for an "Officer and a Gentleman" and in 1983 for "Terms of Endearment."
But in the last decade, she has been noticed more for her off-screen activities than any award-winning performances: a high-profile romance with Bob Kerrey, then governor of Nebraska and now a U.S. senator, followed by a rebound marriage to Timothy Hutton, father of her son, Noah, followed by the break-up of that marriage.
Her films during the last decade have included such undistinguished titles as "Sweet Thursday," "Mike's Murder," "Everybody Wins" and "Leap of Faith."
She bristles at the suggestion that she self-destructed. "I don't feel like I did," she says. "There isn't a movie that I wanted to do that I didn't do. I haven't wanted to work when I haven't worked. Hey, you're bound to do some bad ones. I'm really OK with failure."
Most important to Winger is the successful life she has constructed for herself and her son at their home in upstate New York, about 2 1/2 hours from Manhattan.
It's a long way from the insidious and often destructive glamour and ease of Hollywood, she says. "If you have money, and the weather is such as it is, the influences are deadly."
Early in her celebrityhood, Winger allowed herself to be overwhelmed by the "deadly influences" and counts herself lucky for surviving it - unlike River Phoenix.
"River was a fine boy," she says. "So many of us went through what River went through and we came out the other side. And I remember seeing him at a party and thinking, `He'll come out the other side. He's smart. He's strong.' But you see, he didn't."
There were rumors in the '80s about Winger's alcohol-influenced behavior, about her tempestuousness being induced not by artistic integrity but by the bottle.
"I found that when I was getting in trouble it was when I was living in Hollywood, and I was trying to live among these people I didn't belong with," she says. "I was trying to push it, but I always felt alienated. I always felt heavy. And I partied to anesthetize. And I didn't feel my own life."
"Now I live separate. I do not live amongst them, and that's important. My son and I live out in the woods. And when I come into the world - amongst people that I might normally feel bad about and might make me feel like I don't belong or I shouldn't be doing this anymore - I have a purpose: I'm going to work."
She is fastidious about her work, voracious in her research.
Preparing to play Gresham, she read everything ever written by and about both Gresham and Lewis, including letters and interviews with their acquaintances, spending days at the Lewis archives at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.
"All this stuff works on a level you can't really gauge," she says. "You don't know how it's going to come out."
Most of her time is consumed with raising and home schooling her son, who travels with her everywhere. "He gives me great joy," she says, "and I have to give that back. Someone once said that you're not raising a child, you're raising an adult. And once you can remember that, he gets the respect that he's due."
She has no complaints about the roles available for a woman in her late 30s. "I know I'm like the scourge of the feminist movement," she says, "but as a woman, I've gotten great roles. And going into my 40s, it's just getting more interesting."
Her major complaint about her image is that she'd like to outgrow it. "It's sort of embarrassing to be my age and be called spunky and feisty," she says. "It's like a dog" - she snaps her fingers - "C'mere, Spunky!"
Indeed, Attenborough says about the character of Gresham in his movie, "There's that element of fight in that woman. And Debra is a rarity. There are not many successful actresses who have that inherently in their persona."
But, says Winger, "I have known grace, I've felt it."
She describes her inner life as "actively seeking." She says, "I know that I know nothing. In the vast picture of things, I feel basically like nothing, and I'm going to try to find out what I can . . . work on myself, go inside. And that fundamentally is what the change has been for me."
But asked to reveal what she's discovered inside, Spunky bares her teeth a little.
"Well, I don't have a desire to talk about that in public," she says sweetly, "but if I ever do, I'll call you."
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