At The Movies

`Big Bad Love'

Debra Winger returns to acting in a film directed by
and co-starring her husband, Arliss Howard.

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

I

n a sunny hotel room overlooking the Pacific,
Debra Winger is telling Jewish tales as big and
bad as Big Bad Love, her first film since.
abruptly quitting show business seven years

ago.
With tears welling up in her turquoise eyes, her
famously raspy voice breaking, she describes breath-
lessly attending Manhattan's Congregation B'nai
Jeshurun a couple of days before her son, Noah,
became bar mitzvah in 2000.
"It was the first time I was ever called to the
Torah," says Winger, who wasn't allowed to have a
bat mitzvah growing up in Los Angeles. "My
Orthodox grandmother wouldn't hear of a girl on .
the bimah."
The 46-year-old actress — whom Newsweek once
dubbed "as life-size as the girl next door if the girl
next door happens to be a Marlboro-smoking Jewish
wildcat" — felt she was becoming bat mitzvah that
morning at B'nai Jeshurun.
She's also felt a lingering sadness: "My grand-
mother never acknowledged Noah," she says, laugh-
ing and crying in a manner reminiscent of her
Oscar-nominated turn in 1983's Terms of
Endearment.
"She disowned me when I married his non-Jewish
father (the actor Timothy Hutton). And I had been
the most devoted grandchild, and I had named Noah

after her late husband, and I'd had a bris and raised
him Jewish.
"But she sat shivah for me, and she never took
me back; she took it to her grave."
Unspoken resentments also seethe throughout
Big Bad Love, the haunting saga of an alcoholic
Mississippi writer (played by Winger's current hus-
band, Arliss Howard) obsessed with his ex-wife
(Winger).
"I wanted to investigate what it means to be a
man and a woman, together and apart," Howard, a
boyish-looking 47-year-old, says of his directorial
debut.
Perhaps no one was better suited to play his
onscreen wife than Winger, but she was reluctant.
After starring in the forgettable Forget Paris in
1995, she'd signed her Screen Actors Guild retire-
ment card.
Some observers wondered if her reputation as a
"difficult" actress had tanked her career: She'd
fought. with directors, spurned reporters and pub-
licly trashed her own films if she thought they
were bad.
Keenly peering through wire spectacles during a
recent interview, Winger offers a different explana-
tion: "My mother was passing, and I wanted to be
there for that," she says. "And that segued into a big
reflective period.
"I'd never liked show business, and I just wasn't
finding the kinds of stories I wanted to tell, especial-
ly weighed against the drama happening in my life."

Debra Winger in "Big
Bad Love": To play the
estranged lovers, the
actress says she and her
husband/director/co-star
Arliss Howard `accessed
the couple of days every
year when you imagine
your divorce."

ESTHER ALLWEISS TSCHIRHART
Special to the Jewish News

`The
Cat's
Meow'

Peter Bogdanovich earns
positive reviews for his
first film in eight years.

.4/26
2002

82

A

historic scandal happened in 1924 amid the .
feathered headdresses, Charleston dancers and
contraband boozers on William Randolph
Hearst's private yacht. The rumors about the mysterious
death of film pioneer Thomas Ince aboard ship have
never been put to rest.
The Cat's Meow, directed by Peter
Bogdanovich
from a play by Steven
Peter Bogdanovich and
Peros,
explores
what might have
Kirsten Dunst (Marion
happened
on
the
fateful excursion.
Davies) on the set of
The guest list included Old
"The Cat's Meow"
Hollywood personalities: the leg-
endary Charlie Chaplin, gossip
columnist Louella Parsons and actress Marion Davies,
who was Hearst's mistress.
Bogdanovich burst on the scene in the early 1970s
with three straight hits: The Last Picture Show, What's Up
Doc? and Paper Moon. His other well-received film was
Mask, in 1985.