Shootout

Debra Winger

By her own definition, Debra Winger is first, a mother, second, an ambassador for Sight Savers International, an organization working to eradicate blindness in the world’s poorest countries, and thirdly, an actor. These three facets are all carried off with intensity, fierceness, grace, and good humor. As an actor, her credits include more than 20 films and three Academy Award nominations (An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment, and Shadowlands). While Winger has been acknowledged as one of the finest actors of stage and screen, her talents for the articulation of her craft are outmatched only by her elegance of character as mother and emissary.

Winger’s arrival to acting was the culmination of a route greatly different than those of her contemporaries. As a teenager she immigrated to Israel, where she worked for two years on a collective farm and served in the Army. Upon returning to the United States, she was involved in a serious accident that left her in a coma. During her recovery, Winger thought long and hard about where her life was going, and decided that, upon recuperating, she would become an actress. With this deliberate action, Winger travelled from commercials to the television series, Wonder Woman, to an acclaimed career in film, (Urban Cowboys, The Sheltering Sky, Legal Eagles, Black Widow, and more). She has consequently become one of the beloved actors of our time.

Gradually though, Winger came to understand her values—that superficiality is corrosive, that self-worth doesn't come with a number, and that freedom will always be an essential component of human happiness—and appreciate them as parallel to the principles of countless generations but directly opposite the priorites of the modern, western world. In 1995, at another deliberate crux in her life and career, Winger left acting and—holding to her commitment of walking her talk—did not look back. She later told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that "Nothing quite compares with the sense of liberation I felt. It stays with me: I am happy and I am free."

Such was the impact of Winger’s absence from Hollywood that when Rosanna Arquette directed her documentary about the pressures faced by aging actresses in an industry which seems to provide fewer and fewer roles for women beyond their twenties, she entitled it Searching For Debra Winger.

Fortunately, Winger is not entirely finished with film as medium. Married now to director Arliss Howard, and in the midst of raising three sons, she manages to find the time for the screen again, and she approaches it with more radiance, zeal, and “plucky intelligence” than ever before. While filming Big Bad Love, her first movie in ten years (produced by Winger and directed by Howard who also co-stars), Winger said, "I'm in tune with something now, doing this [movie] and exploring the possibility of playing women over 40 without facial surgery! I don't know if there's a market for it—but I'm interested in it."

Looking ahead, Winger hopes Hollywood as a whole will strive to tell more stories about older women. "I don't know what the aversion is—I'm so proud of the fact that I've lived through most of what I've lived through!"