Miss Firecracker

When a friend posted this 1976 pic of Debra Winger on Facebook (thanks, Liz!), I decided it was time to read Winger’s memoir, Undiscovered. The book came out a year ago with very little fanfare. (Apparently Winger didn’t want her face on the cover, so she compromised and went with a photo of her back.) Actually, “memoir” isn’t quite accurate. It’s an odd, slender, impressionistic volume of compelling essays and bad poems, with drawings by Philippe Petit. (The closing essay reveals her obsession with Petit’s tightrope walking: “All the years I had worked on films and had felt the perfect metaphor for what I was doing in what you were doing—the grace and uselessness of it all—perchance, the art.”) She takes minimalism to a whole new level—you’d have to check her bio to know in some cases what events she’s referring to, or where she was born, or when, or that she was ever married to an Oscar-winning actor or involved with a governor of Nebraska. No mention of playing Wonder Girl, either. Since for three decades she’s been notorious for her outspokenness (a 1994 New York Times profile said she "talks too much, too frankly”), it’s funny that here the couple of times she recalls movie people’s bad behavior—a boyfriend’s duplicity, a director’s nastiness—she doesn’t reveal their names. The few instances of film-set reminiscing are as succinct about the absurdity of fame as they are about her passion for acting. Describing her first starring role, opposite John Travolta in Urban Cowboy, she says, “My entire salary was less than his per diem. But I loved where I was—I could smell something really good, and I was cooking it.” She’s a good storyteller, and a funny one. She comes off as eccentric and feisty and extremely intelligent, just like her performances.

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Classic photo!