Richard Gere’s bitter behind-the-scenes clash: “Are you still saying terrible things about me?”
I don’t know about you, but Richard Gere does not strike me as a particularly unpleasant person. Sure, you can never tell what depths of malice and ‘primadonnery’ a movie star holds, especially when all you have to go on is a handful of performances, but come on. The man is a Buddhist who avoids interviews. How bad can he be?
According to most of his co-stars, he’s not bad at all. In fact, many of them talk about how much they loved working with him. He’s been in the business for five decades, and you (almost) have to go all the way back to the very beginning to find anything resembling a feud. To be candid, it was a big one.
When he and Sylvester Stallone worked together on the 1974 film The Lords of Flatbush, Gere accidentally spilt some mustard on the future Rocky star, causing such a dust-up that he got fired. Accusations would later fly that it was Stallone who originated the notorious urban legend about Gere’s – ahem – fondness for rodents.
Aside from that admittedly large exception, the Pretty Woman star has had a pretty clean track record with his co-stars. That is, until you listen to the many remarks that Debra Winger has made over the years. The two starred together in the lavish 1982 romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman. Directed by Taylor Hackford, it follows a young Navy officer who falls for a local factory worker while attending aviation school. It’s a movie that is frequently cited as one of the most romantic ever made, but there was no love lost between its co-stars.
For years, Winger talked about how much she despised pretty much everyone on set, including Gere. Their chemistry might be crackling on-screen, but according to Winger, he was ‘a brick wall’. At her most magnanimous, she chalked it up to the sins of those around them. “When pigs are involved, when there are bad men running the show, they tend to take the fun out of it,” she said in a 2018 interview on Watch What Happens Live. “Officer and a Gentleman wasn’t so much the director, but we had bad men running the show, and so it kind of dirties the water.” It’s worth noting that she has, in the past, referred to the director as ‘an animal’.
When asked about the tension with Gere in a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Winger downplayed everything. “The only remarks that ever made print were those that ruffled a few feathers,” she said. “I run into Richard Gere quite a lot, and he half-jokes: ‘Are you still saying terrible things about me?’ We had a moment in our life which was not good, but everyone has to get it into perspective.”
It seems that a significant portion of Hollywood did not gain perspective because, after a wildly successful decade in the 1980s, Winger gained the reputation of being ‘difficult’. It’s the kind of label that tends to follow female stars around but never male stars, something Winger was quick to point out. If a man had behaved in the exact same way, she reasoned, “He would probably have been admired for speaking his mind and be called a ‘perfectionist’.”
