Biographie

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 Tendres passions (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.

She was originally signed to play Peggy Sue Bodell in Peggy Sue s'est mariée (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.

She turned down Karen Allen's role in Les Aventuriers de l'arche perdue (1981), which turned out to be one of the highest grossing films of all time.

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.

She spent a good part of the 1980s trying to get the studios to cast her in a biography of torch singer Libby Holman, and another on Isabel Eberhardt, a 19th-century mystic who became involved in fighting religious wars in the Middle East. However, she had burned too many bridges to call in any favors. Also, at that time, studios were reluctant to finance female-driven films, so neither biography was ever made.

[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 Rue de la sardine (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.