Word: joyful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...much of A Dangerous Woman and Shadowlands, Winger plays against her comely strengths. She almost shields her eyes -- she knows they can too easily seduce the camera -- and she makes the audience struggle to like her characters. Her Joy Gresham, dressed dowdily and flaunting a broad Noo Yawk accent, seems at first punished into caricature. Martha in A Dangerous Woman trudges through town as an ostentatious object of pity. The actress won't do all the work; viewers must meet her halfway. With a Winger woman, it's always worth the effort. Joy grows subtly to human size...
Winger is unlikely to change, now that she is a full-time mother with a revived career -- earning critical kudos for her role as poet Joy Gresham in Shadowlands and a Golden Globe nomination for the aptly named A Dangerous Woman. "I really don't care," Winger sighs, in her champagne-and-cigarettes voice, when the subject of her reputation is broached. "I'd rather have the freedom to say what I want. Sometimes I wish I were more graceful, but, hey, I'm not -- though I'm working on it. And frankly, I'm more interested in people...
Fortunately, Richard Attenborough came to the same conclusion. In casting Shadowlands, the director was looking for "an actress who in her own personality had some of the feisty, slightly abrasive elements of Joy Gresham. I knew of Debra's 'difficult' reputation -- of being quite a girl, as we say at home. So I said, 'I don't mind if you slap me around the head -- if at the end of the day what appears on the screen is what we all want.' And of course what happened was that she absolutely came up with the goods...
That lyrical tableau is no longer to be seen. Four years ago, the lords of figure skating eliminated school figures - the art of laying down perfect circles and then retracing the etching exactly - from competitions. The decision changed the nature of the sport - and brought whoops of joy from would-be champions. Now they could concentrate on flashy leaps and spins; certain skaters - Nancy Kerrigan among them - who had trouble with patchwork could surge ahead...
Skater Oksana Baiul, Ukraine's pride and joy...