Word: gresham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...tweed. This must be England-in fact, Oxford of 1951. We are visiting with the charming, boyish at heart, but painfully inhibited C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins), author of the Narnia chronicles for children and a well-known theologian. "Shadowlands" is the story of his encounter with the lovely Joy Gresham (Debra Winger), who Lewis at first dismissively descibes as a "Jewish Communist poet from New York...
...cries. This moving scene involves Lewis letting down his old boy guard to share a wrenching yet tender moment with Joy's son, Douglas (Joseph Mazzello). Hopkins delights as the naive and slightly ingenuous children's author. But Winger seems to do more of the work. And as Joy Gresham she has her work cut out for her. Her character is almost as stereotypical as Lewis' initial analysis makes her sound. She's brash, loud-mouthed, has feminist and other leftist leanings and simply will never be anything but a Yankee. Lewis and his muddled, ex-military brother (an endearing...
...needs shaking up. And Joy Gresham (Debra Winger) is just the woman to do it. She's an American, something of a poet, something of an imposition. But she's also someone any writer is bound to cherish, a knowledgeable fan. They meet for tea; she and her eight-year-old son (she's in the midst of a messy divorce) return for Christmas; and eventually they settle in London. Bemusement soon gives way to concern. Lewis marries her so she can stay in England, but true love does not happen until she falls ill with cancer. A period...
Shadowlands is, in essence, a true story, though screenwriter William Nicholson, adapting his own play, admits that given Lewis' reticence, he has had to imagine much of what went on in the relationship with Gresham. And reticent is the word for Richard Attenborough's film version. But that's a virtue, not a defect, when your setting is English academia (no one has more persuasively captured its manners) and your subject is mortality. There is something very moving in the understated way that these people confront it, something very sweetly believable in their courtship and in the brief bliss they...