The Full Biography
Shirley MacLaine. Actress. Dancer. The Richmond kid who made an understudy night into a fifty-year occupation, then spent the years after the Oscar proving a curious life was also the work.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a Texas mother in a hospital corridor, already in her coat, telling a nurse that this is her daughter and she will go first — a comic will that is also grief. The year was 1983. The picture was Terms of Endearment. What the still cannot show is Shirley MacLean Beaty of Richmond, Virginia, a ballet barre, a Broadway ankle that was not hers, a brother the columns would never stop pairing her with, and a living woman who has treated reincarnation, Japan, and a long old age as material she refused to tidy for the town.
She was born on April 24, 1934, in Richmond, to Ira Owens Beaty, an educator and psychologist, and Kathlyn MacLean, a drama teacher. The household believed in lessons. The brother, Henry Warren Beaty, arrived in 1937 and would become Warren Beatty; the pairing is a fact of American fame and not the plot of her life. She took the mother's maiden name, reshaped MacLean into MacLaine, and went to New York as a teenager with a dancer's compact and a chorus girl's timetable. Washington School of Ballet first. Then the line.
The door was an understudy's night. In 1954 she was covering Carol Haney in The Pajama Game. Haney broke an ankle. MacLaine went on without a full rehearsal, did the part, and was seen by Hal Wallis, who signed her to a film contract while the ankle was still the talk of the company. That is the origin story the town likes because it sounds like luck. It was also a body that had been ready at eight o'clock.
Alfred Hitchcock used her first, in The Trouble with Harry (1955), a Vermont comedy about a corpse and a calm young woman. She was already not a standard ingénue. Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958), opposite Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, put her in a small-town wreck of a woman and brought the first Oscar nomination. Billy Wilder did the rest of the first act. The Apartment (1960) made her Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator with a cracked compact she said she liked that way, a suicide attempt, a Christmas Eve that is also a corporate loneliness. She was nominated again. The picture is the one that lasts if you care about the work more than the legend: a woman who is funny because she is tired, not because the script has hired a kook.
Wilder brought her back for Irma la Douce (1963), a Paris streetwalker, a third nomination, Jack Lemmon again, a comedy that is also a bruise in a different key. Between those pictures she did The Children's Hour (1961) for William Wyler, a schoolteacher in a rumor, a part the Code years could barely say out loud; Two for the Seesaw; Can-Can with Sinatra; What a Way to Go! — a run that treated her as both dancer and bruise. She could carry a musical number and then, in the next picture, sit still while a room decided what to do with a woman who would not tidy herself. Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity (1969) put the ballet years back on a soundstage: Charity Hope Valentine, a taxi dancer who keeps believing the next man, "If My Friends Could See Me Now" shot as if hope were a choreography problem. The picture is Fosse's Broadway transferred, and she is the reason the transfer has a pulse. The 1960s ended with a musical. The 1970s asked her to stop being adorable. She had already, by then, been to the 1960 Democratic convention as a recognizable face and to the peace movement as a recognizable will. She campaigned for George McGovern in 1972, a celebrity door-knock the serious rooms mocked and that she treated as a citizen's hours. The politics were not a hobby. They were another version of the curiosity. So were the books. Don't Fall Off the Mountain put the travel and the marriage on paper before the town was ready for a movie star who wrote in the first person without a ghost's varnish.
The Turning Point (1977), opposite Anne Bancroft, is a ballet drama about the life not taken; another nomination. Being There (1979), opposite Peter Sellers, is a Washington widow who mistakes a gardener's blankness for wisdom; she plays the hunger without a wink. Then James L. Brooks and Terms of Endearment. Aurora Greenway. Debra Winger as the daughter. Jack Nicholson as the astronaut next door. She won Best Actress in 1984, after five nominations and three decades. The corridor scene is the clip. The performance is a whole marriage of comic timing and a refusal to be noble. She had waited. She did not pretend she had not wanted it.
I don't need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.Shirley MacLaine
She married Steve Parker, a businessman with a Japan life, in 1954, the same year as the ankle. The marriage lasted on paper until 1982 and in geography for much of that time as a long commute: she in pictures, he in Tokyo, a daughter, Sachi, raised in a house that was also an arrangement. Sachi has written her own account. MacLaine has written many. The private file is not a secret so much as a shelf of memoirs. Don't Fall Off the Mountain (1970). Out on a Limb (1983), the reincarnation book that made her a punch line in rooms that had not read it and a companion in rooms that had. She has never asked those rooms to agree. She has asked them to let her finish the sentence.
Madame Sousatzka (1988). Steel Magnolias (1989), Ouiser, a Louisiana weather in an ensemble that did not require her to be sweet. Postcards from the Edge (1990), a mother who is also a star, opposite Meryl Streep, a picture that knows what a famous parent costs. Used People. Guarding Tess. The Evening Star, Aurora again. She kept working through the decades the town usually files as residual. The dancer's compact never quite left the walk.
Six things most people never knew
- The certificate is Beaty. Shirley MacLean Beaty. MacLaine is the mother's name, restyled for a marquee.
- Warren is the younger brother. 1937. The pairing is a column habit. The careers are not a duet.
- The ankle was Carol Haney's. 1954. The Pajama Game. Wallis signed the understudy, not the injured lead.
- Five nominations before the statue. Some Came Running, The Apartment, Irma la Douce, The Turning Point, then Terms of Endearment.
- Japan is a marriage chapter, not a tour. Steve Parker. A daughter, Sachi. A long commute the memoirs keep returning to.
- Out on a Limb is 1983, the same season as the Oscar. The town got a statue and a reincarnation book in one winter and never recovered its composure.
The turn is not the Oscar. The turn is that she treated the Oscar as permission to keep being odd in public. A lot of women of her generation sanded themselves down for a late dignity. She wrote about past lives, campaigned in her own key, took the tart parts, and refused the instruction to become a monument who only remembered Fran Kubelik. The curiosity is the second career. The pictures are the first. She has never agreed to separate them.
The later years
The years after Aurora are a working old age, not a sunset reel. She went to Downton Abbey in 2012 and 2013 as Martha Levinson, the American mother who blows into Yorkshire with money and no patience for the silver, a part that introduced her to an audience that had not been born when Wilder shot the elevator. She did Bernie for Richard Linklater, a Texas widow with a secret and a smile; Elsa & Fred, a late-life romance that did not ask her to be cute; The Last Word, a woman who wants to control her own obituary, a joke she was qualified to play. She has taken television that wanted a legend in the cast list and then played a person anyway. The AFI Life Achievement Award came in 2012. The Kennedy Center Honors came in 2013. She accepted them as a woman who still had call times, not as a woman who had agreed to be finished. She kept writing. I'm Over All That, What If..., travel books that treated Bhutan and Spain as sets she had booked for herself. The spiritual file, which the 1987 miniseries of Out on a Limb had turned into a national joke complete with the Pacific and a past life, never closed. She has sat on talk shows and explained reincarnation to hosts who wanted a laugh and given them a syllabus instead. Whether a reader follows her there is not the point of the life. The point is that she would not sand the curiosity down to fit a late-career dignity the town had designed for other women.
The books did not stop. More memoirs, more metaphysical travel, more sentences the late-night hosts could excerpt. She has sat for the long conversations — public television, the festival stages, the birthday interviews — and used them as a continuation of the work rather than a replacement for it. Sachi's book complicated the Japan years in public; MacLaine has answered in her own volumes and then gone back to the next part. Friends from the Wilder sets describe a dancer who hit her marks and then asked a question the joke had not budgeted. Friends from the Brooks set describe a comic timing that is also a will. Both are the life. The brother remains a neighboring famous person; they have been, by turns, close and not, and she has never let the pairing become the obituary in advance.
She has outlived Wilder, Fosse, Hitchcock, and most of the men who told her where to stand. She has not outlived the compact or the corridor. Those still play. What she added, after the honors, was the ordinary work of a famous old woman who still reads a script: a voice part, a festival appearance in Richmond or Los Angeles, a conversation with a young actress who wants to know how you last. She tells them, when she tells them anything useful, to keep the curiosity and to hit the mark. The metaphysics she will also tell, if the room can stand it. The mark she will insist on. She is in her nineties. The barre is no longer a daily job. The curiosity is. She lives as a woman who has outlived most of the men who directed her and most of the women who were nominated beside her, and who still treats a new script as a possible next life. She has not become a recluse in Malibu folklore and she has not become a full-time spiritual circuit. She has become, instead, a working relic who refuses the relic's manners. New parts still arrive when a director wants Ouiser's weather or Aurora's will or simply a face that knows what a studio contract smelled like in 1955.
What she will not do is retire into a clip of the cracked compact. She will take the tart cameo. She will take the book. She will take the interview that lets her finish the sentence about consciousness. Then she will go home. The understudy night made her a contract. The Wilder pictures made her a precision. The Oscar made her a category winner. The decades since have made her an American oddity who is also a craftsman. All of that is the file, and the last of it is the one she is still writing.
The dancer's walk is still in the entrance. The Richmond voice is still in the laugh. The town that once did not know what to do with Out on a Limb now files it as part of the brand and still underestimates the woman who wrote it between call times. She has said she thinks of life as a play she wrote for herself. Whether that is metaphysics or a professional habit does not matter. The next scene is still, as far as she is concerned, available.
After the spotlight moved
It moved toward younger dancers and then came back every time a picture needed a mother who would not behave. Fran Kubelik still teaches film students how little a star can do in an elevator. Aurora still teaches them how much a star can do in a corridor. The brother still occupies the neighboring sentence. The books still occupy the shelf the town pretends not to have read.
She came out of Richmond, took an injured woman's part, learned Wilder's exactness, danced for Fosse, won for Brooks, wrote the odd books, played Ouiser and Martha Levinson, and kept the curiosity past the age when the town prefers a silence. If you only remember the corridor, you have the clip. If you remember the ankle, the compact, Japan, and the next book, you have her.
Portrait: Movie studio publicity still · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons