Debra Winger is a three-time Oscar nominee and has received awards like the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress in 1983 and the Tokyo International Film Festival Award in 1993. She starred alongside Richard Gere, another great actor known for his extraordinary performances in various movies, in An Officer and a Gentleman.
For her performance in the 1982 film, Debra Winger was nominated for the Oscars, and the movie did great at the box office. But both the actors didn’t get along when they were off camera.
The movie was a great hit and made couples in the 80s fall in love all over again, but that was just the promising acting that felt real on screen. In real life, both Winger and Gere didn’t fit well on the movie set. Winger has always been vocal about how she felt about Gere, and while she was around him.
Debra Winger held a grudge against Richard Gere for years
The Urban Cowboy actor had insecurities about her acting skills, which made her act furious with her co-stars. She, in particular, said that working with Gere was like working with a “brick wall”. The Shadowlands actor confessed this in an interview with The Telegraph, continuing “I probably could have come up with something nicer.”
About the movie, An Officer and A Gentleman,
“It’s no secret that I didn’t love ‘An Officer and A Gentleman’ then, and I certainly don’t love it now, so at least no one could accuse me of being inconsistent,”
She stated in an interview with the Daily Mail in 2009. Also, their co-star, Louis Gossett Jr. stated in his book,
“The onscreen chemistry between the two of them was terrific, but it was a different story once the camera was turned off,”
Now that the years have passed, the actors openly joke about the on-set tension that they shared equally. Debra Winger later did a number of movies and starred alongside great actors like John Travolta and Anthony Hopkins.
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Current relation between Richard Gere and Debra Winger
The Runaway Bride actor wasn’t the only reason Debra Winger didn’t like to work on the set of An Actor and a Gentleman. When interviewed, she opened up on Watch What Happens Live in 2018, saying,
“When pigs are involved, when there are bad men running the show, they tend to take the fun out of it,” she explained. “Officer and a Gentleman wasn’t so much the director [Taylor Hackford], but we had bad men running the show and so it kind of dirties the water.”
Now when Debra Winger and the Primal Fear actor meet they maintain a sense of humor about their past and joke about all of it. The actor from Black Widow has said during her interview with The Guardian that,
“I run in to Richard Gere quite a lot and he half jokes: ‘Are you still saying terrible things about me? We had a moment in our life which was not good, but everyone has to get it into perspective.”
The feud between the two great actors seems to be over now. It can be confirmed through the moment at the 2011 Rome Film Festival between Richard Gere and Debra Winger. It was Winger herself who presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to the American Gigolo actor and also thanked him for all of his kindness over the past years, while also calling him a great human.
Source: The Telegraph, Y!Life, TheDailyMail
