Shirley MacLaine sets the record straight
MALIBU >> Shirley MacLaine is putting something together about her life for the first time.
Tucked away in the corner of a shaded patio at a sea view restaurant in Malibu, MacLaine, now 82, is thinking about the onetime expectations of women of her generation.
“I asked my own mother once, ‘What are we supposed to be?’” MacLaine says. “She said, ‘You’re supposed to have nice hair and nice clothes and look pretty.’ She really said that to me.”
MacLaine defied those modest prospects at every turn. The gamine, natural beauty became a movie star when the popular look was lacquered glamour. She sued a studio when she knew she’d been wronged professionally. She demanded the best of everyone she worked with, sometimes leading to less-than-effusive assessments from co-stars.
And she has continued to remain relevant in the youth-obsessed industry at every stage of her career. As she matured, so did her characters. She doesn’t attribute it to ambition, however, but to dance.
Her mother famously enrolled her in dance classes at age 3 to strengthen her weak ankles. It was there that MacLaine fell in love, she says, with “discipline, music, teamwork, pain, balance and strength.”
“If you can get through a ballet class every day of your life when you start at 3 ... I’m just putting this together as a matter of fact ... If you can do that starting at 3, then you are confident,” she says. “I wasn’t like the other girls who were out there trying to be pleasing. I was in class trying to be strong and survive.”
Not unlike MacLaine and her journey, the character she plays in her new movie “The Last Word,” now in theaters, is a woman (Harriet) who also rose above societal gender constraints to become successful in business. Now in her 80s, and lonely, Harriet is thinking about her legacy and impact on the world and hires a local obituary writer (Amanda Seyfried) to write hers.
“I love playing bitches,” MacLaine says with a smirk. “I love the whole idea of being so impossible that it’s funny.”
MacLaine doesn’t like to reflect on the scope of her career, because, she says, “I think I’m going to live a long time.” Yet she’ll tell stories for days about her films in the studio system and the icons she’s worked with.