Shirley MacLaine
Shirley MacLaine is an actor, born 1934.
Before any of the acting there was dancing. MacLaine came up through Broadway choruses, understudying in The Pajama Game, and made her film debut in Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry in 1955. Over seventy years of work followed, which is not a figure of speech: her most recent credit here is from 2022.
What she does better than almost anyone is play a woman being underestimated in a room and knowing it. The Apartment is the canonical case. Fran Kubelik could be a sad-eyed prize for the hero to win, and MacLaine keeps quietly refusing that reading, most famously with a cracked compact mirror she uses to say more than a monologue would.
The 1960s then gave her everything at once: Irma la Douce, The Children's Hour, Two for the Seesaw, What a Way to Go, Sweet Charity. Not all of it worked, and the misfires are instructive, because she was never a passive presence and a film that wanted decoration got something spikier.
The second act was better than the first. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Terms of Endearment as Aurora Greenway, a monstrous, funny, self-serving woman she plays with no defensiveness at all, and returned to the same character in The Evening Star. After that came a run of formidable older women, Ouiser in Steel Magnolias, Doris Mann in Postcards from the Edge, Tess in Guarding Tess, Marjorie Nugent in Bernie. Her honors include six Golden Globes, two BAFTAs, an Emmy, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2012 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2014.
Movies (53)
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
- The Apartment (1960)
- Valentine's Day (2010)
- In Her Shoes (2005)
- Steel Magnolias (1989)
- Noelle (2019)
- Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
- Bewitched (2005)
- Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)
- Rumor Has It... (2005)
- Terms of Endearment (1983)
- Cannonball Run II (1984)
- Being There (1979)
- Irma la Douce (1963)
- Guarding Tess (1994)
- The Little Mermaid (2018)
- Coco Chanel (2008)
- Bernie (2012)
- Postcards from the Edge (1990)
- Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
- The Last Word (2017)
- Sweet Charity (1969)
- The Trouble with Harry (1955)
- Artists and Models (1955)
- Closing the Ring (2007)
- Get Bruce! (1999)
- Elsa & Fred (2014)
- Gambit (1966)
- The Children's Hour (1961)
- What a Way to Go! (1964)
TV (8)
Where to start with Shirley MacLaine
If you watch one, make it The Apartment. It is her best performance and one of the best American films of its decade, and it contains the whole method in miniature: comic timing, a refusal to be pitied, and about four seconds of face doing the work of a whole scene.
Terms of Endearment is the Oscar and deserves it, though it is worth watching Postcards from the Edge alongside it, since both put her opposite a daughter and she plays selfishness with no apology in either. The Trouble with Harry is the debut and still charming. For the 1960s, Irma la Douce and Sweet Charity show the dancer. For late-career precision, Bernie is the pick, a small, sour, extremely funny piece of work, and Being There has her holding her own in one of the great American satires.