Debra Winger Net Worth

Debra Winger's Quotes

• [on her early roles in commercials] I was the all-American face. You name it, honey - American Dairy Milk, Metropolitan Life insurance, McDonald's, Burger King. The Face That Didn't Matter - that's what I called my face.
• I have trouble with star billing. I remember thinking on Cannery Row (1982): How can I put my name ahead of Steinbeck's?
• [on Bernardo Bertolucci] For me, Bernardo is The Function. The only way I can explain it is in the analogy with mathematics and the word 'function' - addition, subtraction, multiplication, anything that numbers go through and change because of it. And when the function is a function of love, the drapes on the windows, the doors that are hung, the characters, the clothes, everything goes through this function and comes out touched and inspired by it. There are a lot of numbers but what really matters is the function.
• [on being labeled "difficult"] It was like armor. It kept the fainthearted at a distance. But perhaps I was too tough.
• I used to love going on a junket and promoting a film when it was not a 24-hour news cycle, and when there weren't so many media outlets. You could actually talk about the film. And I don't mean to harp on this because, really, it's fine. It's just that it eats itself. It becomes about itself, and its symbiotic and weird and I don't understand the celebrity of it.

Interesting Facts about Debra Winger

1. Born at 5:15pm-EDT
2. Daughter of Robert and Ruth Winger.
3. Attended and graduated from Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior High School in Northridge, California in 1970.
4. Attended and graduated from James Monroe High School in Sepulveda, California in 1973.
5. Had a romance with then-Governor of Nebraska Bob Kerrey during the filming of Terms of Endearment (1983).
6. Sister-in-law of actor/writer Jim Howard.
7. Has two sons: Noah Hutton (Emmanuel Noah Hutton; b. April 29, 1987) with ex-husband Timothy Hutton, and Babe Howard (Gideon Babe Ruth Howard; b. June 15, 1997) with husband Arliss Howard.
8. James L. Brooks wrote Broadcast News (1987) especially for her, but she turned it down because she was pregnant with her son Noah Hutton, and the role went to Holly Hunter, who was nominated for an Oscar for it.
9. At first, she was excited about winning the role of Wonder Girl on the television series Wonder Woman (1975) but quickly became disillusioned and spent all her salary from the series to hire an attorney to get her out of her contract.
10. Didn't like working with Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman (1975) but Lynda said that they didn't have any problems and was like a big sister to her.
11. She was given the choice of the two roles in Black Widow (1987); she chose the role of the FBI agent, because she didn't understand the motivation as to why the Black Widow kills, so the title role went to Theresa Russell.
12. In 1995, she appeared in London, Washington, and New York with both the London Symphony and the New World Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, performing his composition based on the life of Anne Frank.
13. Her notorious off-camera clashes with equally mercurial Shirley MacLaine brought out the best in both actresses in the complexity of their on-camera contentious mother/daughter relationship during the making of their Oscar-winning film Terms of Endearment (1983). When MacLaine nabbed the Best Actress Oscar instead of fellow nominee Winger in 1984 and famously shouted, "I deserve this!," she managed to address her co-star as "dear Debra" despite the fact there was no love lost between them.
14. She turned down Karen Allen's role in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which turned out to be one of the highest grossing films of all time.
15. She turned down the role of Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987), which went to Glenn Close.
16. She was originally signed to play Peggy Sue Bodell in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) but was forced to withdraw after her back was severely injured in a bicycle accident. Debra missed out on other roles, due to the many months it took her to fully recover.
17. Directed by eight Academy Award winners: Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Demme, James L. Brooks, Taylor Hackford, Costa-Gavras, Bernardo Bertolucci, David S. Ward and Richard Attenborough.
18. Friends with Sheena Easton.
19. When she was 14, her father had installed a burglar alarm for the celebrated director George Cukor and told him that his daughter wanted to be a actress. Cukor looked at Winger and told her, "That voice, and you got no walk and you got no class!" She suspected that her father might have put Cukor up to this, in order to discourage her from pursuing a acting career. Cukor was still alive when Winger became a star with Urban Cowboy (1980) but he didn't get a chance to know about her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress for An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), since the nomination was announced a few days after he died.
20. She spent a good part of the 1980s trying to get the studios to cast her in a biography of the torch-singer Libby Holman, and another on Isabel Eberhardt, a 19th-century mystic who became involved in fighting religious wars in the Middle East. But she had burned bridges with influential Hollywood people with her outspokenness, and the studios were also reluctant to finance female-driven films, so the two biographies were never made.