Why Hollywood dropout Debra Winger back to acting?
Debra Winger , Winger Debra…. Considering she just got drenched by a passing motorist zooming through a puddle, Debra Winger looks fantastic.Sure, some last-minute wardrobe changes and emergency grooming took care of the street soot, but Winger’s overall radiance goes beyond the fresh white shirt and classic trousers.
There is an energy pouring off Hollywood’s prodigal daughter as she sits before the firing squad of reporters for the first time in more than a decade — and it’s intense.
An A-list dropout since the mid-’90s, Winger turned her back on the business after starring in some of the biggest films of the era, from An Officer and a Gentleman to Terms of Endearment, Urban Cowboy and Shadowlands.

“I think I just got saturated by something,” she says of her decision to check out. “So I’ve done a lot of things I was interested in. I had a book published last month of essays I’ve written over the last decade. I taught at Harvard, a literature class. And it was so great to not talk about [the acting business] and the constant scrutinizing of it. I love the work. I love the work of acting,” she says.
“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 abut the film. And I don’t mean to harp on this because, really, it’s fine,” she says, referring to the celebrity reporting demon.
“It’s just that it eats itself. It becomes about itself, and it’s symbiotic and weird and I don’t understand the celebrity of it. I’m at an age where I shouldn’t have to sit around and talk about that. I love the work. And I would love to work as an actress again.”
Winger says she’s actually looking forward to seeing what type of scripts come her way, now that she’s back in the saddle with a small but standout role in Jonathan Demme’s much-buzzed-about Rachel Getting Married, which opens in Vancouver Oct. 24.