Late one recent wintry afternoon, the chilly river light settled into the living room of one of the two penthouse apartments that Debra Winger owns in an Upper West Side building in New York City. Wearing jeans and an indifferent white pullover, worn gray socks and no shoes, no makeup, Winger poured herbal tea and curled up on the couch. She took a sip. Then she took aim.
She recited from her recent press clippings: " `After eight years of lackluster parts, Debra Winger is back.' Back? Excuse me, but what was working with Bertolucci in the Sahara Desert - chopped liver?" she asked, her sleepy, sandpapered voice rasping to an indignant squeak.The truth is Winger has taken some secondary roles in what have often been, at best, tertiary films. Audiences still remember her for her roles in the early 1980s: as the mechanical bull-riding wife in "Urban Cowboy"; as a local millworker who falls for Richard Gere in "An Officer and a Gentleman"; and as Shirley MacLaine's dying daughter in "Terms of Endearment."
But raise your hand if you saw "Everybody Wins," "Mike's Murder" or "Wilder Napalm." Or for that matter, Bernardo Bertolucci's "Sheltering Sky."
But now Winger seems to have thrown off the curse. In "A Dangerous Woman" Winger's tour-de-force portrayal of Martha - an emotionally stunted young woman who triggers a series of violent and sexual catastrophes - has received generous praise, although the film itself has received reviews that ranged from mystified to annoyed.
Awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe, are beginning to roll in not only for her performance as Martha but also for her role as the raucously vibrant Joy Gresham, the American writer who shakes the soul of C.S. Lewis, the reclusive theologian played by Anthony Hopkins, in the new "Shadowlands."
The actress said she was drawn to the role of Martha because of the character's compulsion to blurt the truth. "Speaking the truth has gotten me into more trouble than any other phase of my personality," she said, and, after nearly five hours of conversation, one can see why.
She talks too much, too frankly: about sex, relationships, a U.S. senator, drugs, Judaism, motherhood, directors and about her own scratchy, irascible self.
Winger's attitude about her confessional candor in the press is similar to her feelings about exposing herself on screen: "What's the difference whether it's 30 people I know well or 3 million I don't?" she said, with a chagrined laugh. "Can you tell which is going to be more humiliating?"
Small wonder that Winger generally avoids interviews - it's the safest way to censor herself. She has given giant headaches to a film's publicity people because, after she has fought with a director, as is her wont, she won't pretend otherwise. Nor, until recently, has she gone quietly about her private business. For years, the press gleefully portrayed her as a capacious consumer of drugs, drink and men.
"But I didn't do anything worse than Jack Nicholson or Roman Polanski," she said with a mischievous grin. "Just kidding. Really."
The actress acknowledged that her reputation in Hollywood for being outspoken and stubborn is well-earned. "I've shot off my mouth in ways that are just not necessary and so I'm sorry about that. But mostly, I'm really not," said Winger - a taut, slim woman with dark, rumpled hair, a saucy smile and lovely turquoise eyes. In person, the actress has a tired prettiness, but she can look striking, even beautiful, on camera.
She is a tart-tongued wit, the sort of woman whom an earlier generation of mothers used to scold for being too smart for her own good. Stephen Gyllenhaal, who directed "A Dangerous Woman," had to pluck more than a few of her barbs out of his hide. "She challenges everyone indiscriminately - she's not particularly respectful or cowed by anyone," he said.
"But she's one of the few actors who will say: `There's a cliff over there; I'll jump off it.' Working with her wasn't like eating dessert - it was a full meal. And I would do it again in a second."
By most accounts, Winger behaved well on the set of "Shadowlands," directed by Richard Attenborough.
"It was a love fest," she said, "and I told Tony and Richard we really shouldn't talk about it because it sounds so awful.
"So I said, `Let's make up some really bad stories. I like to preserve my reputation, so if you guys could talk about how difficult I was, I would really appreciate it.' "
It would not be quite right to describe this 38-year-old actress and divorced mother as having mellowed, but she does seem chastened. A wounding affair with an unnamed man left her feeling blue during the holiday season, and recent deaths of close friends have staggered her.
Yet just when a woe-is-me chorus threatens - "I don't have a lot of friends" - she caught herself, laughing ripely. "And I'm sure if you include that line a lot of people will say, `Well, no wonder!' "
In person, most performers are not nearly as interesting as the roles they play; perhaps to the detriment of her career, none of Winger's characters have been as intriguing as she is herself.
Her living room conveys some sense of her quests and conquests. It is the comfy, flop-down room of a wealthy aging hippie: the rugs are from travels through Algeria and Morocco, there's a hutch from New Mexico and the handcrafted shelves of cherry, mahogany and pine are filled with serious books with cracked spines. The fireplace is framed with slabs of slate for her 6-year-old son, Emmanuel Noah Hutton (her ex-husband is actor Timothy Hutton) to use as a blackboard.
Elsewhere are a cabinet from Nebraska - a souvenir from the days when she was the companion of Sen. Bob Kerrey - and sculptures bought in Bali. Hollywood's wild girl has evolved into a restless woman.
After months traveling in Europe and Northern Africa looking for a place to call home, she bought an apple and feed-corn farm in upstate New York and spends most of the week there, about a three-hour drive from her Manhattan apartments. She said she assumed she'd be living somewhere else within five years.
"There's just not a flight plan," she said. "When I run out of gas, I land for a while."
Her life recently has been considerably calmer than it was in Hollywood, and, she added, in the media.
The wild-girl reputation was overblown, she said. "I would have one bad night, and it rock-and-rolled for five years in the press.
"I only took acid once - hi, Mom! Mushrooms, though, I did a lot of."
She wants to make it clear that she isn't some born-again tee-totaller. "I still enjoy a cocktail, and I never renounced drugs. I'm just not pulled toward them anymore. Right before I got pregnant with Noah, I realized I just could not do drugs and actively pursue what I wanted to pursue."
In this more sedate, tea-drinking period of her life, she carpools, teaches Noah at home on the farm, plants bulbs, reads and spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about herself. "The focus has changed from, `Wow, look at this big bad world - what can I conquer?' to, `Gee, how does this work?' " she said, pointing to her head.
She was feeling sad and deflated, she said, because the relationship of several years with the man she won't name was not turning out well. "In my vast - hah! - experience, I always end up thinking, `What could have saved that?'
"Friendship, not sex. Because the sex comes and goes, and you can't control it. I mean, you can do all the things the magazines tell you to do, but honestly, how many new things can you discover?
"So I'm still working on it, I'm not giving up. Each time I get more tenacious about seeing things through instead of just retreating to my life. Which, by the way, is not so bad. I don't mind living alone.
"When I'm in a relationship, my work on myself is the first thing that goes out the window because I'm so willing to stop!" she said, all but shrieking. "And that's my honest answer and not a very pretty thing to look at. That's why I fail so miserably at relationships."
She conceded, however, that her version of herself as an emotional doormat was perhaps a touch inaccurate. "OK. I'm stubborn. I'm changeable. And I do have a tendency, because I've lived on my own, to just set out to do something without thinking, `Oh, do you want to do this, too?' "
She paused and sighed. "I always forget to ask for what I want. Every shrink I ever talked to said, `You must learn how to ask for what you need!' "
She slips into a thick Jewish accent, "But if you have to ask for it, what's so good about getting it?"
She squirmed and then cracked up, laughing. "And I don't want to ask for it: `Faster, honey! Whoa! Where you going? Slow down!' "
One long-term lover who has become a close friend is Kerrey, the erstwhile presidential contender, whom Winger met in 1983 when she was filming "Terms of Endearment" in Nebraska and he was governor.
"Debra?" said the senator. "Well, let me get my Rosetta Stone out here. She's a very complicated person, you know. Most of us have some potential we can never get to. She knows she has a talent, and that can be very uncomfortable.
"But I trust her. I can tell her things. And she won't give me up." When the ambiguity of that last remark was pointed out to him, the senator puckishly refused to elaborate.
Winger said the two remained in frequent contact. "In his world he hasn't found anyone else, so I still sort of occupy a place that is very comforting for him. Life doesn't have to slap you in the face every morning when you still have a friend to talk to. And I feel that way toward Bob."
She started laughing again. "I just wish he'd get a life. That's always the beginning of our conversation: `Hi. Have a life yet? No? OK. So what's going on in the Senate?' And then he can talk for two hours."