Shirley MacLean Beaty, known professionally as Shirley MacLaine, is an American film,
television and theater actress, singer, dancer, activist and author. She has won the Golden
Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy twice, for her roles in
The Apartment and Irma la Douce, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture
Drama twice for Terms of Endearment and Madame Sousatzka. She was honored with the Golden
Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1998. She was nominated for an Academy Award five times
before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1983 for her role as Aurora Greenway
in Terms of Endearment. She won the 1976 Emmy Award for Outstanding Special – Comedy-Variety
or Music for Gypsy in My Soul in addition she has also won two BAFTA Awards from seven
nominations. In 2012, she received the 40th AFI Life Achievement
Award, the highest honor for a career in the US film industry, from the American Film Institute,
and in 2013 received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime contributions to American culture
through the performing arts. MacLaine's younger brother is actor Warren
Beatty. Known for her New Age beliefs and interest in spirituality and reincarnation,
she has written a large number of autobiographical works, many dealing with her spiritual beliefs
as well as her Hollywood career.
Early life Named after Shirley Temple, Shirley MacLean
Beaty was born in Richmond, Virginia. Her father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of
psychology, public school administrator, and real estate agent, and her mother, Kathlyn
Corinne, was a drama teacher, originally from Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. Shirley's
younger brother is the actor, writer and director Warren Beatty; he changed the spelling of
his surname when he became an actor. Their parents raised them as Baptists. Her uncle
was A. A. MacLeod, a Communist member of the Ontario legislature in the 1940s. While Shirley
was still a child, Ira Beaty moved his family from Richmond to Norfolk, and then to Arlington
and Waverly, eventually taking a position at Arlington's Thomas Jefferson Junior High
School. Shirley played baseball on an all-boys team, holding the record for most home runs
which earned her the nickname "Powerhouse". During the 1950s, the family resided in the
Dominion Hills section of Arlington. She had weak ankles as a toddler, so her mother
decided to enroll her in ballet class at the age of three. This was the beginning of her
interest in performing. Strongly motivated by ballet, she never missed a class. In classical
romantic pieces like Romeo and Juliet and The Sleeping Beauty, she always played the
boys' roles due to being the tallest in the group and the absence of males in the class.
Eventually she had a substantial female role as the fairy godmother in Cinderella; while
warming up backstage, she broke her ankle, but proceeded to dance the role all the way
through. Ultimately she decided against making a career of professional ballet because she
had grown too tall and was unable to acquire perfect technique. She explained that she
didn't have the ideal body type, lacking the requisite "beautifully constructed feet" of
high arches, high insteps and a flexible ankle. Also slowly realising ballet's propensity
to be too all-consuming, and ultimately limiting, she moved on to other forms of dancing, acting
and musical theatre. She attended Washington-Lee High School, where
she was on the cheerleading squad and acted in school theatrical productions. The summer
before her senior year, she came to New York City to try acting on Broadway, and had some
success. After she graduated, she returned and within a year became an understudy to
actress Carol Haney in The Pajama Game; Haney broke her ankle, and Shirley replaced her.
A few months after, with Haney still injured, film producer Hal B. Wallis saw Shirley's
performance, and signed her to work for Paramount Pictures. She later sued Wallis over a contractual
dispute, a suit that has been credited with ending the old-style studio star system of
actor management. Career
MacLaine made her film debut in Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry, for which she won
the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress. In 1956, she had roles in
Hot Spell and Around the World in 80 Days. At the same time she starred in Some Came
Running, the film that gave her first Academy Award nomination – one of five that the
film received – and a Golden Globe nomination. Her second Oscar nomination came two years
later for The Apartment, starring with Jack Lemmon. The film won five Oscars, including
Best Director for Billy Wilder. She later said, "I thought I would win for The Apartment,
but then Elizabeth Taylor had a tracheotomy." She starred in The Children's Hour also starring
Audrey Hepburn and James Garner, based on the play by Lillian Hellman and directed by
William Wyler. She was again nominated, this time for Irma la Douce, which reunited her
with Wilder and Lemmon. Don Siegel, her director on Two Mules for Sister Sara said of her:
"It's hard to feel any great warmth to her. She's too unfeminine and has too much balls.
She's very, very hard."
In 1975, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature for her documentary
film The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir. Two years later, she was once again nominated
for an Oscar for The Turning Point co-starring Anne Bancroft, in which she portrayed a retired
ballerina much like herself. In 1978, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award
for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped
to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry. In 1980, she starred in A Change
of Seasons alongside Anthony Hopkins. The pair famously didn't get along, with Hopkins
saying of MacLaine: "[S]he was the most obnoxious actress I have ever worked with." In 1983,
she won an Oscar for Terms of Endearment, playing Debra Winger's mother. The film won
another four Oscars; one for Jack Nicholson and three for director-screenwriter-producer
James L. Brooks. In 1988, MacLaine won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for Madame Sousatzka.
She continued to star in major films, such as Steel Magnolias with Julia Roberts and
other stars. In 2000 she made her feature-film directorial debut and starred in Bruno, which
was released to video as The Dress Code. Other notable films in which MacLaine has starred
include Sweet Charity; Being There with Peter Sellers; Postcards from the Edge with Meryl
Streep, playing a fictionalized version of Debbie Reynolds with a screenplay by Reynolds's
daughter, Carrie Fisher; Used People with Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates; Guarding Tess
with Nicolas Cage; Mrs. Winterbourne, with Ricki Lake and Brendan Fraser; Rumor Has It…
with Kevin Costner and Jennifer Aniston; In Her Shoes with Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette;
and Closing the Ring directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Christopher Plummer.
MacLaine has also appeared in numerous television projects including an autobiographical miniseries
based upon the book Out on a Limb; The Salem Witch Trials; These Old Broads written by
Carrie Fisher and co-starring Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and Joan Collins; and Coco,
a Lifetime production based on the life of Coco Chanel. She had a short-lived television
sitcom called Shirley's World. She appeared in the third and fourth seasons of the British
drama Downton Abbey as Martha Levinson, mother to Cora, Countess of Grantham and Harold Levinson
in 2012–2013. MacLaine was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors
for lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts in December 2013.
She also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1617 Vine Street and in 1999 was
awarded the Honorary Golden Bear at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2011, the government of France made her a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur.
Personal life
MacLaine was married to businessman Steve Parker from 1954 until their divorce in 1982;
they have a daughter, Sachi. In April 2011, while promoting her new book, I'm Over All
That, she revealed to Oprah Winfrey that she had an open relationship with her husband.
MacLaine has claimed that, in a previous life in Atlantis, she was the brother to a 35,000
year old spirit named Ramtha channeled by American mystic teacher and author J. Z. Knight.
She has a strong interest in spirituality and metaphysics, the central theme of some
of her best-selling books including Out on a Limb and Dancing in the Light. She has undertaken
such forms of spiritual exploration as walking the Way of St. James, working with Chris Griscom,
and practicing Transcendental Meditation. Her well-known interest in New Age spirituality
has also made its way into several of her films. In Albert Brooks's romantic comedy
Defending Your Life, the recently deceased lead characters, played by Brooks and Meryl
Streep, are astonished to find MacLaine introducing their past lives in the "Past Lives Pavilion".
In Postcards from the Edge, MacLaine sings a version of "I'm Still Here", with customized
lyrics created for her by composer Stephen Sondheim. One of the lyrics was changed to
"I'm feeling transcendental – am I here?" In the television movie These Old Broads,
MacLaine's character is a devotee of New Age spirituality.
She has an interest in UFOs, and gave numerous interviews on CNN, NBC and Fox news channels
on the subject during 2007–2008. In her book Sage-ing While Age-ing, she described
alien encounters and witnessing of Washington DC UFO incidents in the 1950s. In the April
2011 edition of the Oprah show MacLaine stated that she and her neighbor observed numerous
UFO incidents at her New Mexico ranch for extended periods of time.
MacLaine is godmother to the daughter of former Democratic U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich.
Along with her brother, Warren Beatty, MacLaine used her celebrity status in instrumental
roles as a fundraiser and organizer for George McGovern's campaign for president in 1972.
That year, she authored the book McGovern: The Man and His Beliefs.
On February 7, 2013, Penguin Group USA published Sachi Parker's autobiography Lucky Me: My
Life With – and Without – My Mom, Shirley MacLaine. MacLaine has called the book "virtually
all fiction". Filmography
Television work Shirley's World and a 1977 one-hour special
Where Do We Go From Here?; winner of the Rose D'Or
Out on a Limb Downton Abbey
NCIS Glee; June Dolloway
Bibliography
References
External links shirleymaclaine.com, her official website
Shirley MacLaine at the Internet Movie Database Shirley MacLaine at the Internet Broadway
Database Shirley MacLaine interviewed by Ginny Dougary
Shirley Maclaine at Emmys.com