Word: aurora
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...used to be almost indifferent to the Oscar. She was often far better than the scripts of her 39 movies, but that was not always enough to make a performance memorable. Then came Terms of Endearment. Aurora Greenway was the part of a lifetime, and also a trap. Says MacLaine: "Aurora was an impossible, demanding, smothering, self-indulgent woman who made me laugh a lot. I adored her directness, her lack of self-censorship and her capacity to grow...
Still, to many people the character was unsympathetic-monstrous or, worse, ridiculous. The cancer-ridden daughter, played by Debra Winger, would get most of the sympathy, and Jack Nicholson's breezy, boozy ex-astronaut would get most of the laughs. Even more perilous for an actress past 40, Aurora had to age, painfully, gracelessly. Unlike stars who demand that the camera flatter them, the vibrant MacLaine made herself look ravaged, the neglected ruin of a beauty...
...East Aurora...
...always felt that if Terms of Endearment lives as a comedy, I would be proud. If not, I would be a little lost." Trying to translate that kind of humor onto film was not easy however. Brooks tinkered endlessly with his script and added a new romance for Aurora, the Nicholson character who was not in McMurtry's novel. Sometimes he made his actors go through half a dozen takes, with half a dozen different approaches, so that he could choose the version he wanted in the editing room. "Jim wanted his choice of different levels of comedy," says...
...then spend a week watching and talking to teen-age girls in River Oaks, the section of Houston where Emma was supposed to have grown up. He would then return to Malibu, think and write about Emma, then take out the Magic Marker again and scribble "In search of Aurora." And off again he would be to Texas...