Debra
Winger Comes to Terms With Fame and Age
(by
Ruth La Ferla for The New York Times -
May
5, 2017)
The
gaggle of diners glanced up from their table at Locanda Verde in TriBeCa, their
eyes out on stalks as they took in the lithe figure heading their way.
Clearly
she was somebody, but who? Their puzzlement could be forgiven. It turned out
that she was Debra Winger, the actress who is almost as famous for turning her
back on her career midstream as for the steamily subversive characters she
played in American classics like “Urban Cowboy,” “Terms of Endearment” and “An
Officer and a Gentleman.”
A
couple of decades ago, she had soured on celebrity, once and for all, so it
seemed.
“It
wants to name you and diagnose you and keep you as a comfort animal,” Ms. Winger
said the other day before quietly changing her tune. “Celebrity is not my
favorite part of the gig,” she confided. “But it’s the price you pay for doing
what you want.”
Has
she mellowed over time? Could be. As she settled into brunch, the once notoriously
thorny star was friendly, even downright cozy, as she talked up her current
project, “The Lovers,” a dourly comic look at marriage (it opened Friday), and
began to reminisce.
True,
she feuded viciously with former co-stars and directors. She once called John
Malkovich, who appeared with her in the 1990 film “The Sheltering Sky,”
“nothing more than a catwalk model.” She endlessly needled Shirley MacLaine
during the filming of the 1983 movie “Terms of Endearment,” tonguing her thigh
during off-camera moments and teasing her crudely about her attire, her
psychosexual antics causing Ms. MacLaine to flee the set.
At
61, Ms. Winger is offering no excuses. “Sometimes I have less tact than other
times,” she said. “If I have an intention I’m going to try to stick with it and
not be taken by someone else’s energy.
“I’m
on a quest; aren’t we all? With humans, it’s always a dance. If somebody’s
moving slower than you are, you’ve got to get them out of your way.”
Her
truculence did not sit well with her long-ago peers or her studio bosses.
“People said I’m too intense,” she acknowledged. “People can’t handle that.”
These
days she is reserving that surfeit of passion mostly for her work.
Pretty,
willful and precociously seductive in her teens, Ms. Winger cherished an
ambition to become a Hollywood star. “But my father put that to rest really
early,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You can’t be a movie star; movie stars are
beautiful.’
“So
I told myself, ‘O.K., well, I’ll be an actress.’ What I really wanted was to
find a way to tell stories.”
In
many ways, she has never really stopped. What seemed like a hiatus in the
mid-1990s was in fact a fertile time. Ms. Winger taught at Harvard, married the
actor Arliss Howard, brought up three sons in Sullivan County, N.Y., and worked
on memorable indie projects, among them a turn as Anne Hathaway’s estranged
mother in “Rachel Getting Married” from 2008. There was the 2010 HBO therapy
drama “In Treatment,” in which she was Frances, a bristly, relentlessly
self-involved actress — “just another in a long line of women I hope never to
become,” she said at the time.
In
“The Lovers,” directed by Azazel Jacobs (“Doll and Em”), she performs opposite
Tracy Letts as one half of a battle-weary couple in advanced middle age, each
engaged in amorous adventures on the side. All that ceaseless ricocheting from
husband to lover and back proves exhausting to Mary, Ms. Winger’s character,
whose furrowed features and unruly mop attest to the gnawing anxiety that comes
with age.
There
are some real-life parallels, the actress noted wryly. The night before, she
had watched a screening of “The Lovers” at the Tribeca Film Festival with some
trepidation. “It’s hard to accept your aging face,” she said. “You’ve got to be
tough.”
Still,
you can hope to ease the pain. “You just give away the mirrors in your house,
one with every birthday,” Ms. Winger said. “By the time you reach the right
age, you have just one little mirror over your bathroom sink to make sure you
don’t have any green in your teeth.”
She
did not have time to ponder the topic for long. She had sandwiched this meeting
between a flurry of interviews and a flight to Los Angeles, where she is
filming the second season of “The Ranch.” In that Netflix series she appears as
the brash, bartending mother of a former sports star, played by Ashton Kutcher.
As
she spoke, her youngest, Babe Howard, 20, loped toward her for a visit and gave
her a hug, careful all the while not to muss her airport-ready turnout.
In
her youth she had been a renegade, raffishly dressed in miniskirts and combat
boots. More recently she has come to terms with her ever-evolving fashion
sense: “It’s all about finding your groove at every age.”
Still
there are limits. “I refuse to go into the future nomadic,” she all but rasped.
“I’m not going to wear some tentlike schmatta that doesn’t say anything.”
Her
pronouncement drew a smile from Babe, who had accompanied her to the previous
evening’s screening — never mind that the film includes a bounty of racy
scenes. They provide grist for the film, which Ms. Winger characterized as “not
a rom-com but a mystery, one that asks how do we keep love alive.”
Love
and sex, like style, are part of an evolving process, she maintained. “It’s all
about chi, your life energy,” she said with Yoda-like serenity. “Like everything
else, it goes through iterations. If it’s alive it changes.”
Till
when? She fixed her companion with a sphinxlike gaze and grinned. “Can I get
back to you on that?” she said.
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