A CONVERSATION SHIRLEY MACLAINE

Shirley MacLaine's Advice to Seniors: Embrace Pets and Take Chances

By DENNIS ANDERSON

Actress Shirley MacLaine lives life in the present at her New Mexico ranch, surrounded by books, animals, photographs of the Hollywood stars, and world leaders that she has shared a lifetime of learning and travel with. It has been more than 60 years since her first Academy Award Nomination, when she was a twenty-something yeal old trading Broadway and the chorus line for Hollywood and a series of roles that would lift her to world fame. Movies in which she was nominated for Best Actress are classics now, such as “The Apartment,” and “Irma La Douce,” and the part that brought home the Academy Award was “Terms of Endearment". She was awarded Best Actress for “Terms of Endearment,” playing the unforgettable controlling mom and diva, Aurora Greenway.

Miss MacLaine learned early that taking chances was the way to get noticed. Her first nomination was for a stark post-war drama, “Some Came Running,” based on a James Jones novel about a war veteran writer played by Frank Sinatra. MacLaine played a simple girl, besotted in love with the moody writer, and in the end, she took a bullet meant for him, at once dying, saving Sinatra, and making herself memorable. “That’s how I got the nomination,” she said. “It was Frank’s idea. If you want to get nominated, take a bullet.”

Even before her early twenties, MacLaine was all about taking chances. In at least two of the many books she has authored, she recounted that her father was an intellectual, and an educator, who was learned and charming “when he wasn’t drinking,” but was never committed to taking risks, and tried to discourage her. Dancing since the age of 3 years old, she nevertheless concluded that ballet would be too confining a career, and still in her teens, she left her Virginia home for the lights of Broadway, joined the cast of “Oklahoma,” and soon after shifted from chorus line, to understudy, to a star role that got her noticed by Hollywood producer Hal Wallis. She has worked with some of the world’s great directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, in “The Trouble With Harry,” Billy Wilder in “The Apartment,” and James Brooks in “Terms of Endearment.” Still, for MacLaine, even fame, fortune, and fraternity with the “Rat Pack” crew led by Sinatra, with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., was only a means to an end. Travel, learning, and experience was what she wanted. She has recounted those quests in her many books, including “Out On A Limb,” and “Sage-Ing While Aging,” packed with guidance and insight for the no longer young set.

“I had been dancing since I was 3 years old, and I always was working, and always had been professional. I actually acted in order to pay for plane tickets,” she said. And when she travelled, whether to India on a spiritual quest, or Bhutan in the midst of a military coup, she was seeking knowledge and understanding. “Somehow, I never felt I was in danger, even if I was,” she said. “I had been an ‘above-the-line’ star since I was 18 years old … (but) I needed some explanation as to why it is so difficult to live.” She added, “I couldn’t feel more responsible in life unless I saw more of it.”

That search took her to India, and to a mountaintop in the Andes, as well as navigating the worlds of stage and screen. And her success in Hollywood delivered her access to some of the world’s most interesting or powerful people, whether prime ministers, national leaders, or physicists. She mourned the recent loss of civil rights icon John Lewis, whom she described as a “friend, and such a sweetheart.”

In her book, “Sage-Ing While Aging,” she writes, “I realize that aging well isn’t about the search for happiness, but more about quietly feeling content with what I’ve experienced. Loving without caring too much, you might say.” It is not all sweetness and light, even if you have spent a lifetime searching for enlightenment, and put your time in on a walk toward the light. With wry humor, MacLaine will sometimes refer to herself as a “Hollywood crone.” “It’s very interesting what happens with invisibility while aging,” she relates. “With aging comes invisibility. It’s shocking how we have disregarded the wisest. And the wisdom that comes with aging, and understanding of life.” She added, it becomes an attitude to “just help her off the curb.’’ “Having been famous since I was 18, I can compare the effect,” she said. “I can compare the effect I have on other people, and that is very fascinating.”

Through the decades, MacLaine has been able to continue working in film and television, writing books, traveling, seeking answers. In recent years, she appeared on prestige television’s favorite soap opera of the landed wealthy, the British period drama “Downton Abbey,” playing the part of a dowager American aristocrat making her presence felt among the blue bloods. “I do know what a pleasure it is to look across a table playing cards with (Dame) Maggie Smith, and realize that I am older than Maggie Smith.”

She grins with the winsomeness of one of the pixies and innocents from her earlier career, and asked, “Is that not an accomplishment?”

It certainly is.