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The Actress Shirley MacLaine Says Farted in Her Face on the Set of ‘Terms of Endearment’

The relationship between the two stars was anything but endearing

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James L. Brooks’s 1983 dramedy Terms of Endearment explores the complex relationship between Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her rebellious daughter Emma (Debra Winger). Emma is eventually forced to move back in with her mother later in life, despite the two having had a difficult time getting along over the years. Funny enough, the constant spats between the fictional mother and daughter were said to have mirrored MacLaine’s real-life interactions with Winger behind the scenes. By most accounts, their time spent together was anything but endearing.

All kinds of rumors have swirled about the pair in the decades since the film was first released. For starters, Winger reportedly kicked up a fuss about not receiving top billing over MacLaine. One of them, though it’s not entirely clear which, even supposedly slugged the other on the set at one point. MacLaine also said that while she was in bed with Jack Nicholson in one scene, Winger snuck under the covers and started licking her ankle in the middle of filming.

But perhaps the most bizarre encounter the two had was recounted by MacLaine in her 1995 book My Lucky Stars: A Memoir. According to MacLaine, on their first day of shooting together, the actresses were called to their marks, though Winger got to hers first, and immediately instructed MacLaine where to stand. When MacLaine didn’t get there right away, Winger told her, “You’re over here.” “I heard you,” MacLaine replied. “I know marks when I see them.”

From there, Winger apparently responded by saying, “Good. How’s this for a mark?” As MacLaine tells it, Winger then “turned around, walked away from me, lifted her skirt slightly, looked over her shoulder, bent over, and farted in my face.” “Do you always talk with your mouth full?” MacLaine fired back. “God, I thought, maybe this was the new, modern, hip way of finding a character,” she remembered. “I felt about two hundred years old.”

Andy Cohen questioned Winger about some of the allegations made about her by MacLaine in 2018. “There were rumors that you tried to pass gas in [MacLaine’s] direction, you licked her leg while she was filming a love scene with Nicholson. Was any of that true?” he asked. In response, Winger smiled and said, “There’s something true in there.” However, in a 2021 interview with The Telegraph, Winger denied MacLaine’s fart accusation, telling them, “I have never known Shirley to tell the truth about anything. If my children heard that story, they would laugh it out of the room since I’m the one that forbids such behavior.” Furthermore, she said, “If you know anything about Shirley’s life, she had a very, very rocky relationship with her daughter. I think she confused stories about her actual daughter with things that I did.”

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