FILM COMMENT : Back From the Shadows : Debra Winger has had her career ups and downs, but in two recent films, she finds roles worthy of her grit

It’s a blessing to see Debra Winger in two major movie releases at the same time. She’s stronger in “A Dangerous Woman” than in “Shadowlands,” but that hardly seems to matter. What’s important is that one of the best movie actresses around is once again connecting with audiences.

Not that she’s been away, exactly--she didn’t pull a Julia Roberts-style disappearing act the past two years. But the two films she appeared in during that time didn’t acknowledge her gifts--worse, she didn’t seem to acknowledge them.

She had a dingbat supporting role in “Wilder Napalm,” released earlier last year but completed in 1991, a black comedy about two pyrokinetic brothers that resembled a Sam Shepard play on Thorazine. “Leap of Faith,” though it had a career-stretching performance by Steve Martin, again relegated Winger to a sideline attraction. She barely had the screen time to locate her character, much less develop it. And before those films there was a two-year disappearing act after “The Sheltering Sky” (1990). In that dry-gulch period she walked off “A League of Their Own” and Alan Pakula’s “Significant Other.”

All of Winger’s walking, of course, only reinforced her rep for being “difficult”--a frequent slam against strong-willed actresses. (When Bruce Willis or Alec Baldwin do this sort of thing, they’re just being guys.) But some difficulties are worth it. Show business needs its sacred monsters. The scandal of Winger’s career has not been her temperamentalness but, rather, the reluctance or the failure on the part of most of our finest filmmakers to fashion great roles for her.

For Winger may be that peculiarly American phenomenon--a great actress who has yet to appear in a great movie (and precious few good ones). She’s also had the misfortune to give two of her best performances in movies that practically no one saw: “Mike’s Murder” and “Everybody Wins,” both of which, to compound the misfortune, were drastically recut.

After Winger appeared in “Terms of Endearment” in 1983, she was the hottest young actress in Hollywood, with two hits, “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Urban Cowboy,” already behind her. She hasn’t had a hit since, and yet there’s a recognition when she’s on screen that hers is the kind of talent that unifies audiences in simple, direct ways.

This is not the only way to connect with audiences or to be a star, but, compared to the glossy etherealness of many female stars, Winger’s directness really clears the air.

Winger started out in films like “French Postcards” and “Thank God It’s Friday” and on television as Wonder Woman’s kid sister Drusilla, but her breakthrough came in 1980 with “Urban Cowboy.” She lent some flavor to that canned corn. As Sissy, whose marriage to John Travolta’s Bud skids into a quick U-turn, Winger made it seem as though this woman’s upsets were frighteningly vital. There’s nothing showy or anecdotal about her work in this film.

Everybody remembers the moment when Sissy bucks the mechanical bull at Gilley’s Kama-Sutra-style, but the real payoff to that scene comes right after Bud, who has witnessed everything, clomps out of the bar furious and humiliated. We see a look of humiliation on Sissy’s face that matches his. She can’t bear to hurt him and yet she just did, willfully and unsparingly. Winger gives us all this in close-up in a few heart-stopping seconds.

The reason Winger’s sexually heightened scenes are often so resonant, so talked about, is for precisely this sort of insight. She gives sex an emotional charge. In “An Officer and a Gentleman,” her brief, notorious coupling with Richard Gere has a heated, everyday sensuality; they look like real people enjoying each other’s bodies, not just a couple of pumping movie stars. That scene in “An Officer and a Gentleman” may have helped to make it the Make-Out Movie of its year, but its power comes from what it represents for Winger’s Paula--it’s a confirmation (she thinks) of her man’s love. And because Paula has already shown us how much in need of love she really is, the scene is, in the truest sense, a consummation.

Winger can fill out a rigged fairy tale like “An Officer and a Gentleman” and make it seem almost real because she doesn’t play up Paula as a working-class ditz; this woman’s sexual longing is part of a deeper longing, and Winger doesn’t sentimentalize it (even when the script does). Most working-class women who appear in our movies might as well be carrying a placard--”Look at Me, I’m Underprivileged.” But for Winger, in movies like “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Urban Cowboy,” being working class is just a part of who she is, neither a defect nor a badge of honor.

She was also the truest thing in “Terms of Endearment,” with its sitcom Norman Rockwell-ish vistas of the middle class, and its dying Camille finale. Winger played up the knockabout comedy of mundane bliss and misfortune: Her scenes with her philandering husband, whom she loves anyway despite herself, or with her dotty mother, her milquetoast lover, her rapscallion children, are like illuminated pages in a family album.

Winger has a gift for sanity in this movie that turns her trials into a kind of communion with us. We know people just like her--we are her. It’s the most difficult kind of heroic performance because it confers on an ordinary character an unstressed specialness.

Winger’s defining characteristic as an actress is a fluid, radiating intelligence and an almost ecumenical respect for emotional truth. This explains how she can present a woman who might otherwise seem mundane and give her a rich buzzing inner life. The bank teller hooked on a low-level drug dealer in “Mike’s Murder” or the flippy floozie in “Everybody Wins” might seem depressingly retro were it not for Winger’s capacity to give each woman her due.

She can show you how these women against their reason (or unreason) might be pulled into sordidness by men, and how they might hang on. In “Mike’s Murder,” for example, her Betty is excluded from the bewildering object of her own passion. She gets pulled into the outlaw world of her cryptic lover after his murder because she wants to know what happened not only to him but to herself.

They have a phone sex scene, that, for her, is practically a deflowering; in bed with him, she’s beyond the reach of caution. Her serene languor when she’s with him transports her. When she looks at Mike’s photo at the end of the film and smiles, it’s like watching the lifting of a fever dream.

In “Everybody Wins,” Winger commandeers what is otherwise a pretty terrible movie by sheer force of talent. Perhaps only an actress who radiates intelligence can play so well a character whose intelligence is deranged. In terms of character, the film is like the flipside of “Mike’s Murder.” Winger plays a woman with a lurid, possibly apocryphal background who lures a decent man into unthinking ardor. Angela Crispini is the kind of role that, with a less gifted actress, might have turned into a multiple-personality tour de force--in other words, the kind of performance you want to avoid. But the split personalities in this film seem so richly lived-in that, individually, they could each sustain their own movie. What unifies Angela in all her guises is self-exhibitionism. She’s turning herself on, horrifying herself, and it’s as if Angela is not really there except as witness to the spectacle.

Angela’s voice can swing from unctuous breathy sincerity -- the voice of a radio pop psychologist perhaps -- to something scabrous and overenunciated, as if she were clamping down on her words to anchor her fear. Her moods may swing but within each mood she’s rapt, flush. She melodramatizes her life in order to give it form -- in order to make it comprehensible to herself.

In “Dangerous Woman,” she plays a woman, Martha, who also seems shattered by some kind of inner trauma but, unlike Angela, she is completely guileless. Where Angela was flamboyant and ferociously sexual, Martha seems stunted, childlike. She has an almost animal reaction to fear, and to happiness too. And yet the most moving moments in the performance are when Martha is caught in the blur between the two. Her childlike looks are so poignant because you can see the adult trying to come through.

When she is kissed by the handyman who has moved into town, Martha ranges from blissed out to freaked out: Winger gives you 10 emotions in a glance. When we see her later, she’s still carrying an electrostatic charge from the clinch. Martha’s clompy grace, her tight, imperious smiles when she’s scared, her shorn quality when she tries to make herself over for the handyman--all of these things come from deep inside the actor’s art. This role could have devolved into the “town screwball,” but Winger gets inside her skin. It’s her way of conferring her blessing on Martha.

She’s impressive in “Shadowlands” too, although the role is too inspirational and constricting for her. As Joy Gresham, the unhappily married American poet whose correspondence with C.S. Lewis leads to a friendship and then to love, Winger is used for her brusque forthrightness; like Martha, she speaks the truth. Most of the movie is given over to the ways in which Lewis, is brought out of his comfy cocoon and delivered for the first time since childhood into the real world of pain and loss and love. Joy is not required to go through a comparable register of revelations, but Winger undercuts the role’s sacrificial angel aspects by showing us Joy as an essentially lonely woman beneath all the cant. Her provocations of Lewis have a twinge of rage in them.

Winger’s appearances in these two films are heartening because they show she’s still challenged by acting. She’s almost always chosen her roles on the basis of risk, and even when the risk hasn’t paid off, as in “Betrayed,” or in “The Sheltering Sky,” where she seemed wan and disembodied, you could respect the fact that she wasn’t just plunking herself into a pool of froth. As “Legal Eagles” demonstrated, she couldn’t have made a go of it in conventional vehicles anyway. Without the opportunity to employ her fine-edged instincts in that film, she seemed dank and characterless beside the fluffed golden glamour of Robert Redford and Daryl Hannah. Even her marvelous raspy honking voice, with its squeaks and blats and deep-toned murmurs, seemed juiceless.

Winger’s career is bound up in challenge in more ways than one. She also represents a challenge to Hollywood. Here, after all, is an actress who requires great roles at a time when most roles for women are dinky and ornamental and when women pushing 40 are lucky to get anything to play. Hollywood has never been very accommodating to actresses like Winger of strong artistic conviction. And Hollywood has never needed them more than now.