Debra Winger Urban Cowboy (1980)
Debra Winger (born May 16, 1955, Cleveland Heights, Ohio) plays Sissy in Urban Cowboy (1980). She was twenty-four during production.
Winger had been an episodic television actress when Bridges saw her dailies
By 1979, Winger had a thin résumé: Slumber Party '57 (1976), a Lynda Carter–era recurring role on Wonder Woman (1976) as Drusilla / Wonder Girl, an episode of Police Woman, and a small part in James Bridges's French Postcards (1979). It was the French Postcards dailies tape that Bridges showed his casting director when Sissy Spacek was unavailable.
"I was working — I was working all the time. I was on every episodic show. Police Woman, Wonder Woman, Quincy. I was the redhead the casting people knew. I was not a movie star. I was an actress." — Debra Winger, The New York Times (2008)
Bridges has said the audition was decisive within fifteen minutes. Winger and Travolta read a scene; the room felt the shift.
Winger trained on the bull and rode in most of her shots herself
Winger spent the pre-production period learning the bull alongside Travolta. She had no prior physical-performance background — no dance, no rodeo — but she committed to the riding the way Travolta did. Most of Sissy's bull rides in the picture are her.
"Debra would not let us double her. She wanted to ride the bull herself. There were two or three shots where the operator turned the bull's intensity down for her, but she was on it. She wanted Sissy to be a rider, not look like one." — James Bridges, American Film (1980)
The decision was load-bearing for the picture's argument. Sissy's bull-riding is the structural object the marriage breaks on; if it had been a stunt double, the breakup punch wouldn't have the weight it has.
The friction with Travolta is in the picture
Winger and Travolta did not get on personally during the shoot. She has addressed it more directly than he has in subsequent interviews.
"It was not a love affair. We were not friends on the set. But that's actually what the movie needed — two people who were rubbing each other the wrong way the whole time. You can see it. The movie wanted that friction." — Debra Winger, The New York Times (2008)
The result onscreen is two people who feel like they've been married three weeks and are starting to discover they don't agree on anything. The film needed that and has it.
Winger emerged from Urban Cowboy as a major star
The decade after Urban Cowboy belongs to Winger. Cannery Row (1982); An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), her first Oscar nomination; Terms of Endearment (1983), her second; Mike's Murder (1984) with Bridges again; Legal Eagles (1986); Black Widow (1987); Betrayed (1988); Made in Heaven (1987); and The Sheltering Sky (1990), Bertolucci. She was the most respected American actress of her generation by 1985 and one of the few women working at the level of Streep or Pfeiffer.
"Debra Winger has the most expressive face of any actress in the picture. She doesn't act with her voice. She acts with her bones. You can see her think." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1983)
She also had a famously difficult relationship with the studio system. The Rosanna Arquette documentary Searching for Debra Winger (2002) — its title taken from her semi-disappearance from leading roles in the 1990s — became a cultural shorthand for the age-out problem in Hollywood.
"I haven't quit. I just stopped doing the bullshit. There's a difference." — Debra Winger, Searching for Debra Winger (2002)
She has continued to work in independent film, theater, and television (most prominently In Treatment and The Ranch), but the mass-audience years end around 1990. Urban Cowboy is the picture that opened the door to the run, and Sissy is her first lead.