Aurora Greenway is the role for which Shirley MacLaine won the Academy Award, and it is easy to see why. In James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment, MacLaine plays a widowed, wealthy, fiercely independent woman in Houston, Texas, whose entire emotional life revolves around her daughter Emma, played by Debra Winger. Aurora is proud, vain, funny, sharp-tongued, and terrified of being alone. She is also, underneath all of that armour, one of the most loving characters in American film. MacLaine’s performance, which won her the Oscar for Best Actress after five previous nominations, is a triumph of balance: she makes Aurora difficult without making her unlikeable, and loving without making her sentimental.
The film follows Aurora and Emma over many years, from Emma’s childhood to her marriage to a young teacher, Flap Horton, played by Jeff Daniels, and her life as a mother of three in a small Texas town. Aurora disapproves of Flap, and she is not shy about saying so. She and Emma argue constantly, about men, about money, about how to live, and yet their bond is unbreakable. When Emma becomes seriously ill with cancer, Aurora’s defences fall away, and the film becomes a story about a mother facing the one loss she cannot argue with, charm away, or control. It is a famously tearful film, but its tears are earned, because Brooks and his cast have spent two hours showing us why these two women matter to each other, in all their exasperating, hilarious particularity.
MacLaine’s Aurora is a creation of wonderful detail. She is a woman who keeps her house immaculate, her opinions definite, and her romantic life, after years of widowhood, firmly closed, until she meets Garrett Breedlove, her neighbour, a retired astronaut played by Jack Nicholson. Garrett is a cheerful rogue, a drinker and a womaniser, and Aurora is both appalled by him and attracted to him. Their courtship, if it can be called that, is one of the film’s great pleasures. Nicholson, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, plays Garrett as a man who has never grown up, and MacLaine plays Aurora as a woman who has grown up too much, and who is delighted, against her better judgement, to be made to laugh again. Their scenes together, especially a lunch in which Aurora tries to remain dignified while Garrett flirts outrageously, are comic gold, and they give the film’s later sadness a foundation of joy.
James L. Brooks, making his feature directing debut after a career in television, directs with a rare combination of comedy and compassion. He lets scenes run long, he lets actors interrupt each other, and he lets the humour come from character rather than from jokes. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and it was a huge commercial success, because audiences recognised themselves in it. Many people have an Aurora in their life, or are an Aurora, or are an Emma, trying to love a difficult parent without losing themselves. The film does not offer easy reconciliation. It offers something better: the recognition that love, even when it is expressed as criticism, is still love.
MacLaine’s achievement is to make Aurora’s criticism feel like love rather than cruelty. When Aurora tells Emma that she is making a mistake, she is not trying to control her. She is trying, clumsily and sometimes selfishly, to protect her. When Aurora fusses over her appearance, or insists on her routines, she is not being vain for its own sake. She is holding herself together. MacLaine, who was herself a mother, and who had played many strong women, understands that strength is often a performance, and that the performance can become a prison. In the film’s final act, as Emma dies, Aurora’s performance breaks down, and MacLaine lets us see the frightened, loving woman underneath. It is devastating, and it is why the Oscar was so richly deserved.
The supporting cast is superb. Debra Winger, as Emma, is warm, stubborn, and heartbreakingly alive, and her chemistry with MacLaine feels like a real mother-daughter relationship, full of shorthand, irritation, and devotion. Jeff Daniels, as Flap, plays a man who is weak but not villainous, and John Lithgow, as Emma’s friend Sam Burns, provides a quiet, decent counterpoint. But the film belongs to MacLaine. She is in almost every scene, and she carries its emotional weight without ever seeming to strain. She is funny in the early scenes, sexy in the middle scenes, and shattering in the final scenes, and she makes those shifts feel like the natural progression of a single life.
Terms of Endearment has been imitated many times since, often badly, by films that mistake sentimentality for feeling. What those imitations miss is the specificity of Brooks’s writing and MacLaine’s acting. Aurora is not a generic movie mother. She is a particular woman, with particular tastes, particular prejudices, and a particular way of saying “I love you” that sounds, half the time, like “You are doing it wrong.” That particularity is what makes her universal. Audiences do not cry at the end of Terms of Endearment because the film tells them to. They cry because they have spent two hours with Aurora and Emma, and they do not want to say goodbye.
For MacLaine, the role was a culmination. After nearly thirty years in film, after comedies, musicals, westerns, and dramas, she finally had a part that used everything she could do: comedy, drama, romance, and a lifetime of experience as a woman, a mother, and a star. Aurora Greenway is not just a signature role. She is the role that proved, to anyone who still doubted it, that Shirley MacLaine was one of the great screen actresses of her generation, and that her greatest performance might also be her most human one.