One of the great moments in Oscar history began with Liza Minnelli opening an envelope. (It’s a wonder there are any great moments in Oscar history that don’t begin with Liza Minnelli opening an envelope.) With a smile on her face, Minnelli read the name of her old friend: “The winner is Shirley MacLaine for Terms of Endearment!”

This outcome couldn’t have been a surprise. MacLaine, already a screen legend just two weeks shy of her 50th birthday, had already won almost every single best actress award Hollywood could offer up for her performance as Aurora Greenway, from the Golden Globes to the National Board of Review. (Those nasty BAFTA voters, opted for Maggie Smith in A Private Function instead.) Not to mention that Terms of Endearment was the film of the Oscars in 1984, nominated for 11 awards in total and en route to winning five of them, including three for James L. Brooks as writer, director, and producer.

MacLaine’s speech was one for the clip reels, though she neither wept nor screamed nor talked politics. She nodded toward Oscar history (a joke about Maureen Stapleton’s famous line about thanking everybody she’d ever met in her whole life), and her own recent, much-discussed turn toward transcendentalism. She thanked costar Jack Nicholson for providing her with “such middle-aged joy” as an onscreen bed partner. She talked about what a gift Terms of Endearment was to her at this stage of her career, having previously been nominated four times for the best actress Oscar. Though she cracked a joke about having waited 26 years for this moment on the Academy Award stage (“thank you for terminating the suspense”), she also knew it was coming at the right time. MacLaine received that rare gift: an Oscar for the right performance.

But there are two parts that everyone remembers best: her tribute to the “turbulent brilliance” of her costar and fellow best actress nominee, Debra Winger, and her iconic closer: “I deserve this, thank you.” And to understand how those things are connected, you have to go back to one of the most eagerly discussed on-set feuds of the past 50 years.

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The stories of behind-the-scenes animus between MacLaine and Winger on Terms of Endearment have been passed around enthusiastically over the years, a classic Hollywood on-set rivalry that brings back memories of the greats like Crawford and Davis, Olivier and Hoffman. Much of it was reported as the film was being released in 1983/84. “No one can get a fix on their relationship,” said Brooks at the time. “Not even the participants.” By all accounts, it boiled down to a clash of personalities and working styles. Both women reportedly stayed in character through the shoot, and the intensity of their relationship led to friction. “We knew what we were doing a lot of the time, sparring back and forth, playing games,” Winger said at the time, with MacLaine offering, “It was a very gritty way of working. People at Paramount thought we were crazy.”

That kind of too-close-for-comfort relationship was a reflection of their characters in Terms of Endearment, an intimate dramedy about a mother and daughter and the complex relationships that surround them. MacLaine played Aurora as the meddlesome, overbearing mother who believed she knew better when it came to her daughter’s life choices and wasn’t shy about saying so. Winger’s Emma rebels against her mother’s controlling hand, moving halfway across the country with her no-good husband, but that mother-daughter relationship never collapses. The bond between two actors can never truly replicate that between a parent and a child, but for a short burst of time, by all accounts, MacLaine and Winger got the temperamental frustration of their characters’ bond just right.

Over the subsequent years, both Winger and MacLaine have stoked the fires about their testy relationship. In MacLaine’s 1995 autobiography My Lucky Stars, she told the story of Winger yelling at her on set to “get over here” and hit her mark. Per MacLaine: “‘I heard you,’ I said. ‘I know marks when I see them.’ ‘Good,’ [Winger] said. ‘How’s this for a mark?’ She turned around, walked away from me, lifted her skirt slightly, looked over her shoulder, bent over, and farted in my face.”

Winger acknowledged the friction when she was promoting another film in 1986, telling The New York Times, “I can’t deny that we fought. We’re not having lunch together today. We challenged ourselves, and when we got tired of challenging ourselves, we challenged each other. But I think there was always a respect between the two of us.'”

Winger herself had amassed quite a reputation for friction with coworkers, before, during, and after production. She famously sparred with Richard Gere on the set of An Officer and a Gentleman. Years later, she quit the lead role in Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own when Madonna was cast in a supporting role. In that same interview in which she acknowledged that she and MacLaine had fought, she buried the film she was promoting, Legal Eagles, and its director Ivan Reitman, saying the film had been “edited with a chainsaw.”

Winger isn’t the first woman in Hollywood to have been tagged with the “difficult” label over the years, and we’ve learned to take these kinds of stories with a grain of salt and not cast the kind of judgment that we once had. Still, it’s a reputation that has hounded her for the bulk of her career. Appearing on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live in 2018, Winger bristled at host Andy Cohen asking once again about the MacLaine feud and mistakenly saying that Winger had written about MacLaine. (Cohen has since said she’ll likely never agree to return to the show.)

However complicated the relationship between MacLaine and Winger was, it’s all on the screen during that Oscar clip. Even before the winner is announced, Winger is on camera muttering something under her breath to her companion. On MacLaine’s way up to the stage, she takes a detour to Winger, cradling her onscreen daughter’s face in her hands as the women share a seemingly sincere embrace. And then there’s that phrase: “I wanted to work with the turbulent brilliance of Debra Winger.” It’s such elegant shade. A compliment wrapped in delicate thorns, not sharp enough to break the skin.

But the legend of Winger and MacLaine’s on-set feud still can’t obscure the pair of towering performances these actors delivered in the movie. Forty years later, Terms of Endearment’s reputation has only grown. It’s the kind of movie that, cliché as it’s become to say, they really don’t make anymore. Or if they do, they don’t become hits like Terms did. Domestically, the film earned $108 million in its six-month theatrical run, the equivalent of over $320 million today. It finished second at the yearly box office to Return of the Jedi, beating out sexy dance romances like Flashdance, popular comedies like Trading Places and Vacation, and the latest big-screen efforts from James Bond, Dirty Harry, Superman, and Jaws. All this for a movie whose only explosions were when MacLaine thundered at a floor of hospital employees to give her daughter a shot of painkiller.

The best Oscar speeches are the ones that are fully aware of their place in Hollywood history: Halle Berry commemorating her landmark best actress win by thanking the women who blazed the path before her; Jane Fonda nodding toward her controversial stance on Vietnam before setting that conversation aside for another time; Julia Roberts basking in the spotlight knowing that she was standing in a moment that would be replayed again and again. More than anything else, Shirley MacLaine seemed to be aware of the significance of the Academy Award and its place in her career. And with “turbulent brilliance,” she gave us four decades’ worth of rolling those two words around in our heads and gossiping about great Hollywood feuds; a “cellar door” for Oscar-watchers and actors-obsessives.