Shirley MacLaine has ‘ The Last Word’
She talks Oscars flubs, great parts and being ‘ queen of AARP’
MALIBU, CALIF. Shirley MacLaine didn’t just have a front- row seat to Oscars history. She lived the drama.
It was MacLaine’s brother, Warren Beatty, who was handed the wrong envelope to present the best- picture award.
The result will live on in Oscar infamy.
MacLaine, 82, was aghast as her younger brother was swept up in the furor.
“We’re all processing the horror of it,” she says. But she’s proud about how Beatty has handled himself, and she gets big- picture philosophical:
“We’re all on life’s stage. And the decisions we make when we’re on this stage define who we are. Shakespeare was right: Life itself is show business.”
No one knows the showbiz life better than MacLaine, who returns to the screen in The Last Word ( in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, opens nationwide March 24), her first major film role since last year’s Wild Oats.
“The grande dame is back in action,” says director Mark Pellington.
Screenwriter Stuart Ross Fink wrote the role of tough retired businesswoman Harriet Lauler with MacLaine in mind, almost as an extension of her Oscar- winning performance as uptight Aurora Greenway in 1983’ s Terms of Endear
ment. “It’s like, what would have happened later to Aurora?” Pellington says.
The actress says she didn’t need to be convinced: “I know how to read; I knew it was a great part.” MacLaine relished playing the control freak who enlists the local paper’s obituary writer ( Amanda Seyfried) to pen a positive, even if phony, final write- up.
“I love playing bitchy roles. Really,” MacLaine says with a laugh after asking for an umbrella and a heater at her favorite outdoor table overlooking the water at Geoffrey’s restaurant.
“Am I playing myself? I don’t know. Maybe. Well, it’s fun. And that’s what I am having, fun.”
MacLaine emphatically points out that she has more laughs than Harriet or Aurora and isn’t “a diva or movie- star demanding. That’s not who I am.”
She just knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it.
“Put it another way: I know what I don’t want. That’s more it. Really. I’m not demanding. I don’t want to be cold, so therefore I want a heater. Usually what I don’t want is understandable to everybody.”
She cracks up again. “But maybe I’m wrong.”
MacLaine, a prolific best- selling author, is content espousing her new- age spirituality and progressive philosophies, living off the Hollywood grid with homes in Malibu and New Mexico. (“I love the away- ness of it.”) But she embraces any opportunity to find great film roles that represent senior citizens.
She is retooling two projects that she flatly refuses to describe.
“Someone will steal them. They have to be and will be fixed,” she says. “I want to serve an underserved audience, I want to be the queen of AARP.”
In the meantime, she vows to keep on smiling as she did on Oscar night, before things turned bad, as she sat next to Matt Damon.
“I saw him trip Jimmy Kimmel,” she says.
“And Jimmy almost fell on his butt. That made me laugh. My God, I couldn’t stop. We almost had a moment, a bigtime thing.”