Emblematic actress of the '80s, she starred in hits like The Force of Endearment and Challenge to Destiny, but she decided to retire from it at her most successful moment.
Few people who reach star status decide to retire when they are at the top of the wave. But some do. One of them is Debra Winger, who turns 65 today, decided to retire from high-profile exposure in 1995, when her career was going through a great moment, she had been nominated three times for an Oscar, was loved by the public, and had an even brighter horizon.
Debra filmed about twenty movies but she became known above all for Challenge to Destiny, The Strength of Endearment, and The Sheltering Sky, among others. However, at 40 years old, she preferred the silence of anonymity, and to live a life far from Hollywood and stardom.
With two young children, she decided to leave the sets and start studying at Harvard University, announcing that she was no longer interested in the type of movies that were being filmed.
With her attitude, she revealed something that had been worrying her for a long time: Hollywood had no space for women and even less for those who were not very young.
Winger went public with that complaint more than once, comparing herself to various colleagues of her generation. "Michelle Pfeiffer and I started together, we were about the same age, now she looks like my little sister," she told New York Magazine in 2001.
Her departure from the film industry did not go unnoticed. But she didn't change her mind. Her disappearance from the big screen and from public life was so well known in Hollywood that in 2002 Rosana Arquette filmed the documentary Looking for Debra Winger where actresses such as Whoopi Goldberg, Meg Ryan, Jane Fonda, Sharon Stone or Debra herself spoke of the difficulty of women "of a certain age" to find relevant roles.
The actress was born in Ohio on May 16, 1955, as Mary Debra Winger, into a Jewish family, and in her teens, she lived on a kibbutz in Israel where she also did her mandatory military service. When she returned to the United States, she suffered a serious accident that caused her to lose mobility and vision for a year.
That strong episode marked her and she assures that it was the moment in which she decided that she wanted to be an actress. She started on television in the Wonder Woman series playing the younger sister of Lynda Carter's character.
Then, in the '80s, she got film roles, first opposite John Travolta in Cowboy to Town. And that's where the successes began. Many producers considered her "unattractive" but that did not stop her from asserting herself for talent and seduction despite those opinions.
In Challenge to Fate, she shared the cast with Richard Gere and the film broke records around the world. Although, they say they didn't get along on set and she didn't leave him with the best memories of her despite an Oscar nomination. In The Strength of Endearment, she was the daughter of Shirley MacLaine and she once again established herself as a rising star.
A curious and little-known fact about Debra is that her voice, one of her most outstanding characteristics, was part of the amalgamation of sounds that gave voice to E.T. by Steven Spielberg.
Robert Redford, Tom Berenger, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Billy Crystal, and Bernardo Bertolucci were some of the names of the actors and directors she worked with before her retirement.
She married Timothy Hutton and then actor-director Arliss Howard. And she has two children, one with each.
In recent years, she tried acting again and participated in some series. The last one, in 2018 was The Ranch, by Netflix. She also wrote her memoirs and criticized a few colleagues and the film medium in general. Of her, she kept a low profile that she knew how to achieve without neglecting her chair of cinema at Harvard.
