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MacLAINE, Shirley

Born Shirley MacLean Beaty, 24 April 1934, Richmond, Virginia

Daughter of Ira O. and Kathlyn MacLean Beaty; married Steve Parker, 1954; children: Suki

Born Shirley MacLean Beaty (brother Warren added the second "t") into what she describes as "a cliché-loving, middle class Virginia family," MacLaine was raised to be respectable and conventional. She found an early outlet for her energies in ballet lessons, which she began at age three. By the time she graduated from high school, she had abundant professional credits as a dancer. Heading for New York City, she made her way into the chorus of some hit musicals, among them Rodgers and Hammerstein's Me and Juliet (1953).

In 1954 Carol Haney broke an ankle three nights after the Broadway opening of Pajama Game, and MacLaine was called upon to replace her. Performing without rehearsal, she emerged a star. Hollywood producer Hal Wallis instantly signed her to a long-term contract, and she played the first of many madcap roles in Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955).

In the next decade, MacLaine played a number of major movie roles, specializing in kooks and good-hearted prostitutes. She received Academy Award nominations for Some Came Running (1959), The Apartment (1960), and Irma La Douce (1963). Her offbeat marital life also generated much comment.

When not before the cameras, MacLaine devoted a great deal of time to travel, exploring lifestyles radically different from her own. She toured the deep South with black leaders in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, and researched her role in Irma La Douce by witnessing at close range the working life of a Paris streetwalker. MacLaine's travels are described in her bestselling book Don't Fall Off the Mountain (1970, reissued 1983).

In 1971 a television series for which MacLaine had great hopes turned out to be a commercial and artistic disaster. Alienated from the Hollywood establishment, she turned from show business to politics, playing an active role in the presidential campaign of Senator McGovern. Her second publication was McGovern: The Man and His Beliefs (1972), a collection of writings she selected and edited. Although the McGovern campaign was unsuccessful, MacLaine retained an interest in public affairs and social action. In the spring of 1973, she was asked to lead the first women's delegation to the People's Republic of China. This six-week trip became the central episode of her second bestseller, You Can Get There from Here (1975). Another outgrowth of the trip was a documentary film, The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir (1974), which MacLaine produced and which received an Academy Award nomination.

After the trip to China, MacLaine returned to her theatrical career with renewed vigor. In 1974 she made her hugely successful Las Vegas debut, and has since had triumphs on stage, screen, and television. For her ballet film The Turning Point, MacLaine was once again honored with an Oscar nomination.

MacLaine's books are marked far less by her stylistic skills than by a keen eye for detail and a refreshing candor. Genuinely interested in all she surveys, MacLaine is not ashamed to reveal the ambivalence of her personal reactions. This is especially true of her account of the China trip: Her focus is not so much on the fact of China as on the way the impact of the Chinese experience threw a group of American women into total mental confusion. In her unflagging eagerness to probe and evaluate the world around her, MacLaine shows herself to be very different from other writers of show business memoirs.

In the public mind, MacLaine is first and foremost a Hollywood star. Prior to 1983, her reputation as a writer was based on two candid, colorful travel memoirs. But the publication in 1983 of Out on a Limb (reprinted 1986) brought MacLaine into a new arena. In this book, which was to become a bestseller, she recounts her search for her own spiritual identity, ending in her embracing such New Age concepts as reincarnation, trance channeling, and astral projection. For the spiritually unconvinced, her best writing here details her trip to the remarkable Mantaro River Valley, high in the Peruvian Andes. But the bulk of the book is divided between MacLaine's tortuous love affair with a married British politician and her ongoing movement from skepticism to spiritual certainty.

Dancing in the Light (1985, reissued 1996) opens in 1984, with MacLaine, at the top of her profession, looking back on a year that included the Academy Award for best actress for Terms of Endearment, the overwhelming success of Out on a Limb, and the record-breaking run of her one-woman musical show on Broadway. Amid all this joy, she must contend with the health problems of her aging parents. She speculates on their complex interrelationship and why they chose to spend this lifetime as a couple. To probe the mystery of the entangled lives of her parents and other family members, she journeys to Santa Fe for a session with a spiritual acupuncturist. The book climaxes with her multiple visions of herself in previous incarnations—as an elephant princess in Africa, a desert nomad swept away by a marauding chieftain, a helpless liberal in czarist Russia. Ultimately, she meets her own androgynous Higher Self, who will serve as her personal inspiration and spiritual guide.

Some of the most convincing passages of Dancing in the Light deal with the life of a working dancer. Similarly, It's All in the Playing (1987, 1988) effectively brings the reader behind the scenes into the filmmaker's self-absorbed world. The book also probes MacLaine's further spiritual development during the filming of a television miniseries based on Out on a Limb.

Going Within: A Guide for Inner Transformation (1989, 1990), inspired by seminars MacLaine has given from coast to coast, introduces the reader to additional spiritual possibilities. They include forms of meditation, the seven chakras, and something called psychic surgery. The book extends the optimistic vision of each individual's godlike potential that has marked MacLaine's earlier works. MacLaine is always a refreshingly honest writer, but the intensity of her spiritual beliefs may try the patience of many readers. On the acting front, MacLaine was lauded for performance in Steel Magnolias.

In Dance While You Can (1992, 1993), MacLaine returns to explorations of her relationships with her parents, her mother's ambitions for her children and her father's anxieties, and to the struggle to resolve the tensions she has faced with her own daughter. Beginning with memories of Hollywood, the book details MacLaine's experience of aging, as an actress in Postcards from the Edge, coping with injury and pain, more often alone. Less insistent on detailing her spiritual development, the book continues MacLaine's account of her search "to become harmonious with the music of the universe." She also released her first video, Shirley MacLaine's Inner Workout to considerable success.

In the later 1990s, MacLaine continued to write, act, and perform on stage. Her recent book, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir (1995), about some of the Hollywood movers and shakers she's known, was another bestseller. In addition, she appeared in several films, including with Wrestling with Ernest Hemingway, Guarding Tess, Mrs. Winterbourne, and Evening Star, the long-awaited sequel to Terms of Endearment. She then turned her attention to directing: her directorial debut was a film entitled Bruno, in which she also acted, along with Kathy Bates.