David Thomson

“I met Debra Winger in the early eighties, to write a profile for California magazine. She had so much going for her then: she was articulate, unruly, raucous, funny, but very smart; she had something of the young Stanwyck; and she was young enough for her evident insecurities to seem natural--she was not yet thirty…. [I]n Urban Cowboy… she had stolen a big picture with her bravura tough prettiness, her through-and-through snappines, and one sequence on a mechanical bull. In An Officer and a Gentleman…, she had seemed hot, urgent, and gritty… Just ahead lay Terms of Endearment… in which her portrait of a young woman dying of cancer was free from sentimentality or easy pathos… [S]he seemed capable of a large career.”

David Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film
Third Edition (1994), p.

[In review of Peggy Sue Got Married, Thomson called Winger “the best young film actress around”, California Magazine, November 1986.]