February 17, 2002

Debra Winger Is Back From a Long Break, but on Her Own Terms By DANA KENNEDY

Elliott Marks/IFC Films
Debra Winger and Arliss Howard, married in real life, play a divorced couple in "Big Bad Love."

DEBRA WINGER and her husband, Arliss Howard, are accustomed to questions about why Ms. Winger left the movie business six years ago. And they have a good answer as to how Mr. Howard, the star and director of Ms. Winger's new comeback film, "Big Bad Love," lured his wife back into acting.

He promised her a Highland cow.

Ms. Winger, who has spent time in Scotland, spotted the animals there and fell in love. "They looked like loaves of bread from far away," Mr. Howard recalls. "So finally I said, after everything else had failed to get her to be in the movie, I will get you a Highland cow."

The revelation, 100 percent true or not, is a rare moment of levity during a recent interview in Manhattan with Ms. Winger, 46, and Mr. Howard, 47, who met during the filming of "Wilder Napalm" in 1991 and were married in 1996. They live in Westchester County, in a riverfront house with his son Sam, 14, by a previous marriage, her son Noah, 14, from her first marriage, to the actor Timothy Hutton, and their son, Babe, 4.

Mr. Howard, in addition to starring in "Big Bad Love," also wrote the screenplay (with his brother James) and is the director. The film, which opens on Friday, is based on a book of short stories by the Mississippi writer Larry Brown. Mr. Howard plays Barlow, an embittered Vietnam vet with a drinking problem who is trying to make it as a writer. Ms. Winger, who plays Barlow's ex-wife, Marilyn, also ended up producing the movie by default when financing ran out at the last minute. The cast and crew were already on location in Holly Springs, Miss., and 12 days into filming, so Mr. Howard and Ms. Winger were faced with either abandoning the project or producing it themselves.

Ms. Winger says she was drawn to "Big Bad Love" after years of resisting Mr. Howard's entreaties to read more Southern literature. Mr. Howard is a native of Missouri. But Ms. Winger, who was born in Ohio, says she has always felt more like a "Yankee." Until filming began in Mississippi, Ms. Winger says, it was "very hard to get me south of the Mason-Dixon line."

The movie received mixed reviews at last year's Cannes International Film Festival. Ms. Winger's role in the film is smaller than her husband's, but her character is the one to be reckoned with.

The same is true in real life. At first, Ms. Winger so dominates the conversation that it seems that Mr. Howard, hunched over a plate of food, will never say a word. Only when a specific request is made does he start to talk.

Angie Dickinson, who plays Barlow's mother in the film, observed the couple on the set. "She's the forceful one, and he nods," Ms. Dickinson says. "He's not a guy's guy, he's very gentle. But he's far from a milquetoast. The nodding isn't `Yes, dear," it's more like, `You're doing what I want.' "

Mr. Howard, whose work includes supporting roles in movies as varied as Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" and "Johns," a 1996 film starring David Arquette as a male prostitute, says he was moved enough by the Larry Brown stories to visualize them on the screen . Right about the same time, a little more than seven years ago, Mr. Howard says, he was approached by various people in the film industry people who suggested he try directing.

Mr. Howard's decision to develop "Big Bad Love" into a movie coincided somewhat with Ms. Winger's decision to leave show business after nearly two decades and three Oscar nominations. (Her last screen role was the poorly received romantic comedy "Forget Paris," with Billy Crystal, in 1995.) But she is adamant that it is "show business" she disliked and left, not acting.

"I worked as an actress," she says, pointing out several plays she has been in. Ms. Winger co-starred with Mr. Howard in the American Repertory Theater's 1998 production of "How I Learned to Drive" in Cambridge, Mass. They teamed up again in 1999 for the company's production of "Ivanov." She also had a teaching fellowship for a year at Harvard under the psychiatrist Robert Coles. She taught a course called The Literature of Social Reflection.

Ms. Winger insists there was no precipitating event that led to her departure from film. But it didn't help that a movie she was set to make with Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp called "Divine Rapture" fell apart when the financial backing dried up just three weeks after shooting began in Ireland in late 1995. Ms. Winger admits it was a disappointment but says it was not the only reason she left.

"I just had diminishing returns on my investment," she says. "People like to say, `What was it, who did it?' But it's never one thing. Different things had either broken my heart or just been debilitating. And some things had been amazingly positive. Like I got to do "Shadowlands" and "Dangerous Woman" in one year. Those were a dream for me."

Ms. Winger says she experienced a number of "seminal events" in her life, including her mother's death in 1996. Of her movie roles, she says: "I was not engaged in the way that I wanted to be, to put in what I put in. It just seemed to me, like because you've been doing it all your life, do you automatically keep doing it?"

Mr. Howard says people respond with "disbelief and contempt" when they hear Ms. Winger tell why she quit. "Debra walked away when she was at the top of her game, so people want to say she turned this age and so there wasn't the material coming in, which isn't true," he says. "For someone to walk away from stardom, ultimately people get irritated when they think about it."

The actress Rosanna Arquette, who plays the girlfriend of Mr. Howard's best friend (Paul Le Mat) in "Big Bad Love," says she, too, wondered what happened to Debra Winger, even before she was hired for the movie. After turning 40, Ms. Arquette says, she found it hard to get work and thought Ms. Winger might have had the same experience.

After she got the part in "Big Bad Love," Ms. Arquette decided to make a documentary about what happens to Hollywood actresses over 40. The finished film, which includes interviews with dozens of actresses, including Daryl Hannah, Frances McDormand, Melanie Griffith, Anjelica Huston and Jane Fonda, is titled "Searching for Debra Winger," and Ms. Arquette hopes to show it at Cannes this spring.

"She's like Yoda," Ms. Arquette says of Ms. Winger, whose Zen-like interviews appear throughout "Searching for Debra Winger." "She told me she was looking for something that was more important to her when she left. It can be a mean business, especially when you turn 40. It's like we're in our prime, we're ready to rock, and they tell us to play the mother of a 20-year-old."

Ms. Winger began her career in 1976 playing "Wonder Girl" in several episodes of the "Wonder Woman" television series. Then, in 1980 she became a star when she was hired for the role of Sissy, a feisty young woman who learns to ride a mechanical bull at a Houston bar and charms John Travolta in "Urban Cowboy." As Mr. Howard puts it on the "Big Bad Love" Web site: "Is there a man alive who doesn't remember her on that danged bull?"

She went on to make some slight movies, like "Mike's Murder" (1984) and "Legal Eagles" (1986) as well as some great ones. She has been nominated for an Oscar for best actress for "An Officer and a Gentleman" (1982), "Terms of Endearment" (1983) and "Shadowlands" (1993).

Ms. Winger was sometimes termed "difficult" by her colleagues, most famously by Shirley MacLaine, who spoke of her "turbulent brilliance" during the turbulent shooting of "Terms of Endearment." The director of that movie, James Brooks, declined to comment on Ms. Winger, other than wishing the interviewer good luck by e-mail and adding, "Debra is unique."

When asked about what it was like to direct his wife, Mr. Howard gave the kind of long, abstruse answer that seems to be his trademark and to delight Ms. Winger. "You don't really direct Debra," he says. "What I think sets you up to do your best thing is clarity. You have a task, a particular task in this particular piece of the film, because it's all like quilt making. And it gets all gussied up, and the notion of art behind acting, but basically it's about performing a task. You're looking for where you're doing your acting to be in the most optimum set of conditions. And since you are sometimes doing the equivalent of heart surgery in a bathroom, the only thing that makes it the best place to do it is the feeling that the person who is watching is absolutely engaged."

Ms. Winger calls her career a "great run" but also says flatly that she was mainly in it for the art. "I hated the business," she says. "I don't think there's ever been a time when I liked the business."

In particular, she dislikes dealing with the press, and she and Mr. Howard frequently veer off into tangents about it. They can both be engaging, but after a few minutes of any topic that they deem unsuitable for what should be a "thoughtful article" about their movie, stern lectures ensue about the course the interview is taking.

Ms. Winger says she was reminded about the "meanness" of the business when she posed for a photograph for a recent magazine article. She said the photo editor "peppered" her with questions about why she had left movies and "obviously didn't believe a word" of the explanations Ms. Winger gave. "She then, of course, implied I had no choice, that there was no work coming," Ms. Winger says. "She was out to get me. I thought, `I need to just leave her be.' But of course, she proceeded to print a picture that would ensure that I wouldn't work for the next 10 years."

That remains to be seen. Ms. Winger signed her Screen Actors Guild retirement card when she decided to quit movies, and taped it above her mirror so she could look at it every day. But she is now an active member again, and says she enjoyed working with Mr. Howard so much that she is open to doing more movies. "I look at the last five years in film and don't think I've really missed something I should have done," she says. "But I am, for the first time in a while, open again. There are some new young directors that are really interesting."

One thing is certain. Ms. Winger will avoid making films in which her character dies. "I remember walking through the living room years ago when the series `Roseanne' was on," she says. "John Goodman said, `Come on, do you want to go down to the multiplex and watch Debra Winger cough up another lung?' It was the funniest line to me. Then I realized, that's it for me. I can never do another film about death. I've cashed that card."

Dana Kennedy reports on entertainment for MSNBC..

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