Shirley MacLaine

Many years ago, Richard Roeper asked Shirley MacLaine about the possibility of her appearing in a movie with Warren Beatty, and her response was, “Well, not if we’re paired romantically, of coruse.” Roeper said he’d forgotten they were siblings. She changed the spelling of their mother’s maiden name, and he changed the spelling of their father’s last name, and so it became not only possible but easy to forget. They don’t look all that much alike, but if you look for the resemblance you can see it. Still, thought they’ve both been working for decades—her for slightly longer, but then she is the older sibling.

She started on the stage. Her mother put her in dance to strengthen her weak ankles when she was three, but MacLaine herself said she didn’t have the figure to be a ballerina—for one thing, she outgrew the other girls in her class and ended up playing almost exclusively male roles. The one time she had a prominent female role, as the fairy godmother in Cinderella, she performed on a broken ankle. That determination would keep her going to a career on the stage, albeit not as a dancer. Jerry Lewis saw her understudying in The Pajama Game and had her brought to Hollywood.

Her first movie was seventy years ago. Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, his one comedy, was released first, followed by Artists and Models, the film for which Lewis wanted her. She hasn’t gone more than a couple of years without a film or a TV show in all that time. That is serious dedication. They haven’t all been winners, but there are still some classics in there. She’s got an Oscar for Terms of Endearment and five other nominations, including for Documentary Feature. There’s a lot of career, and she was even on Only Murders in the Building for two episodes.

And, okay, there’s the past lives thing—in a local connection to me, she claims to have once been the brother of Ramtha, the 35,000-year-old sage from Atlantis channeled by Yelm crackpot J. Z. Knight. She’s written books about her New Age beliefs. She’s written autobiographies about, you know, this life. She’s written a book about George McGovern. Clearly she’s got to have something to do in between appearances on the screen and even occasionally the stage.

Her personal life is not something I feel capable of unpacking. She has one child who wrote an angry tell-all book that MacLaine has dismissed as fiction, but of course she would whether it was true or not. She herself says her marriage was open and that she had affairs with many of her costars, apparently not including Jack Lemmon or Jack Nicholson. She says she’s now close to her daughter, but again, she would, wouldn’t she? Either way, her career is a long-lasting, impressive one.