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One of the great moments in Oscar history began with Liza Minnelli opening an envelope. (It’s a wonder there are any great moments in Oscar history that don’t begin with Liza Minnelli opening an envelope.) With a smile on her face, Minnelli read the name of her old friend: “The winner is Shirley MacLaine for Terms of Endearment!”
This outcome couldn’t have been a surprise. MacLaine, already a screen legend just two weeks shy of her 50th birthday, had already won almost every single best actress award Hollywood could offer up for her performance as Aurora Greenway, from the Golden Globes to the National Board of Review. (Those nasty BAFTA voters, opted for Maggie Smith in A Private Function instead.) Not to mention that Terms of Endearment was the film of the Oscars in 1984, nominated for 11 awards in total and en route to winning five of them, including three for James L. Brooks as writer, director, and producer.
MacLaine’s speech was one for the clip reels, though she neither wept nor screamed nor talked politics. She nodded toward Oscar history (a joke about Maureen Stapleton’s famous line about thanking everybody she’d ever met in her whole life), and her own recent, much-discussed turn toward transcendentalism. She thanked costar Jack Nicholson for providing her with “such middle-aged joy” as an onscreen bed partner. She talked about what a gift Terms of Endearment was to her at this stage of her career, having previously been nominated four times for the best actress Oscar. Though she cracked a joke about having waited 26 years for this moment on the Academy Award stage (“thank you for terminating the suspense”), she also knew it was coming at the right time. MacLaine received that rare gift: an Oscar for the right performance.
But there are two parts that everyone remembers best: her tribute to the “turbulent brilliance” of her costar and fellow best actress nominee, Debra Winger, and her iconic closer: “I deserve this, thank you.” And to understand how those things are connected, you have to go back to one of the most eagerly discussed on-set feuds of the past 50 years.
The stories of behind-the-scenes animus between MacLaine and Winger on Terms of Endearment have been passed around enthusiastically over the years, a classic Hollywood on-set rivalry that brings back memories of the greats like Crawford and Davis, Olivier and Hoffman. Much of it was reported as the film was being released in 1983/84. “No one can get a fix on their Relationship,” said Brooks at the time. “Not even the participants.” By all accounts, it boiled down to a clash of personalities and working styles. Both women reportedly stayed in character through the shoot, and the intensity of their relationship led to friction. “We knew what we were doing a lot of the time, sparring back and forth, playing games,” Winger said at the time, with MacLaine offering, “It was a very gritty way of working. People at Paramount thought we were crazy.”
That kind of too-close-for-comfort relationship was a reflection of their characters in Terms of Endearment, an intimate dramedy about a mother and daughter and the complex Relationships that surround them. MacLaine played Aurora as the meddlesome, overbearing mother who believed she knew better when it came to her daughter’s life choices and wasn’t shy about saying so. Winger’s Emma rebels against her mother’s controlling hand, moving halfway across the country with her no-good husband, but that mother-daughter relationship never collapses. The bond between two actors can never truly replicate that between a parent and a child, but for a short burst of time, by all accounts, MacLaine and Winger got the temperamental frustration of their characters’ bond just right.
MacLaine in Terms of Endearment.© Paramount/Everett Collection.
Over the subsequent years, both Winger and MacLaine have stoked the fires about their testy relationship. In MacLaine’s 1995 autobiography My Lucky Stars, she told the story of Winger yelling at her on set to “get over here” and hit her mark. Per MacLaine: “‘I heard you,’ I said. ‘I know marks when I see them.’ ‘Good,’ [Winger] said. ‘How’s this for a mark?’ She turned around, walked away from me, lifted her skirt slightly, looked over her shoulder, bent over, and farted in my face.”
Winger acknowledged the friction when she was promoting another film in 1986, telling The New York Times, “I can’t deny that we fought. We’re not having lunch together today. We challenged ourselves, and when we got tired of challenging ourselves, we challenged each other. But I think there was always a respect between the two of us.’”
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