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People Magazine
15 October 2001
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Maj. Richard Winters (played by Damian Lewis)

“I would follow you into hell,” a sargeant wounded in France, wrote from his hospital bed in 1945 to Easy Company’s frontline commander for much of the war. “With you I knew everything was absolutely under control.” Most tightly under wraps were Winters’s feelings toward the troops he commanded. “To be a good officer, you must stay aloof. It’s a matter of life and death for the men you’re giving orders to,” says Winters, 83, who was 26 and an Officers’ Training School graduate when he earned the Distinguished Service Cross for leading a 12-man assault against 50 Germans at Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944), killing 15 and capturing 12.

“I’m much more outgoing than he is,” says Lewis, 30, the British actor who plays him. “But I didn’t say a funny thing to my friend for the nine months we were filming. Dick was spare with words, and that’s how I was.” He can still recite Winters’s diary entry the day after his D-Day assault: “I just want to find a quiet farm someplace and live in peace.” After the war Winters did just that. In 1951 he and his wife, Ethel (with whom he has a son and a daughter), bought a farm outside Indianapolis, Pa., near their Hershy home, and ran a successful animal food products business. Today, Ethel, 79, stand on a rise of the 108-acre property, spreads her arms wide and tells a visitor, “I just wanted you to see what Dick was fighting for.” —-

Photo caption: “I wasn’t sure Damian could do the job,” says Winters of Lewis. But as the miniseries progresses, “I see him become more confident, just as I did.”