Debra Winger (born May 16, 1955) is an American actress. She gained critical acclaim for her performance in Urban Cowboy in 1980. She then gave Academy Award-nominated performances in An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment and Shadowlands. She has also been nominated for four Golden Globe awards, two BAFTA awards, an Emmy Award, and won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress for Terms of Endearment and the Tokyo International Film Festival Award for Best Actress for A Dangerous Woman. Winger was born as Mary Debra Winger in Cleveland Heights, Ohio into an Orthodox Jewish family, to Robert Winger, a meat packer, and Ruth (née Felder), an office manager. She has stated publicly and with amusement that the Internet has a growing "snowball" of claims that she had been part of a kibbutz in Israel, whereas she was merely on a typical Israeli youth program that visited the kibbutz. After returning to the United States, she was involved in a car accident and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage; as a result, she was left partially paralyzed and blind for ten months, having initially been told that she would never see again.