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James L. Brooks is reflecting on the long-reported rift that developed between Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine on the set of their 1983 hit Terms of Endearment.
Brooks, now 85, sat down with PEOPLE recently to discuss his legendary career producing, writing and directing across Hollywood and his new movie, Ella McCay.
While chatting about his directorial debut, Terms of Endearment, Brooks admits the mood on set felt like “when mom and dad are fighting, and that kind of frozen feeling you get in the pit of your stomach that you can do very little about it… it was a little like that.”
PEOPLE has reported in the past on stories of rifts between MacLaine, now 91, and Winger, now 70, who played the mother-daughter duo Aurora Greenway and Emma Greenway-Horton in the 1983 dramedy that Brooks adapted from author Larry McMurtry’s 1975 novel of the same name. (Brooks previously described the on-set environment as “stormy” during a 2023 interview about the movie’s 40th anniversary.)
“At the end, there was enormous grace on Debra’s part, because we went to the Oscars,” Brooks says now; the movie won five Oscars at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984, including Best Picture as well as Best Actor and Best Actress wins for Jack Nicholson and MacLaine. “Everybody came home with an Oscar except Debra.”
“People were posing with their Oscars, and she sat there posing with an imaginary one,” he recalls. “So she had great grace at the end of it, but for a while there it was as rocky as it gets.”
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Brooks, of course, won three Oscars in one night for Terms of Endearment as its screenwriter, director and producer. He recalls feeling “tremendously emotional” when he won his first award for Best Adapted screenplay, and “then surreal after that, you know. Just out of space.”
“The night that I won everything, my mind was blown, and I’d won the writing Oscar and then the director’s thing happened, and I’m sort of in a stupor,” he recalls. “My head is down, I’m dazed, and Jack, he says, ‘Go for the triple!’ “
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Outside of Oscar wins for Brooks, MacLaine and Nicholson — whom Brooks recalls handling his second career Oscar win “like a veteran soldier” — Winger received her second of three career Academy Award nominations for her role in the movie. John Lithgow was nominated for Best Supporting Actor alongside Nicholson, and the movie also received nominations for Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Best Film Editing and Best Original Score.
“Just some great acting. And the extraordinary charisma, same thing,” Brooks says of Nicholson’s performance in the movie. “One of the greatest actors alive, with extraordinary charisma. It’s nuts when that’s a combo.”
Ella McCay is in theaters now.
