Shirley MacLaine: 10 essential films

In her ingénue era, former Broadway chorus girl Shirley MacLaine excelled at embodying wisecracking characters all too experienced with seedy men, who refused to give up their hopes that life had something better in store for them. She played tough cookies with marshmallow hearts, and starry-eyed young women with spines of steel.

MacLaine surfed that transition from ingénue to mature actress with unusual ease. While she had her big-screen debut in 1955, she made a lot of her best movies in the 70s and 80s. As she grew older, her characters had dealt with even more disappointments, and gained all sorts of interesting new facets in the process: their wounds had made them tougher, pricklier, yet they hadn’t stopped hoping. After five nominations, spanning from 1959 to 1978, she finally won an Oscar for her indelible performance in 1983’s Terms of Endearment.

And although it hasn’t quite been up to her classic work, she’s been an entertaining presence in a whole lot of productions since the new millennium, most notably in Richard Linklater’s acclaimed black comedy Bernie (2011). Seventy years on screen, and she is still going strong.

To celebrate her 91st birthday, here are 10 of her best films.

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Veteran and ex-writer Dave (Frank Sinatra) drunkenly buys a coach ticket back to his hometown, after an absence of many years. He turns up with good-time girl Ginnie (MacLaine) in tow, but only seems interested in her when he’s drunk – sober, it’s prim school teacher Gwen (Martha Hyer) he wants. In the world of Some Came Running, where everyone is obsessed with social climbing and secret keeping, Ginnie’s sweet-natured, guileless lack of sophistication means she’s a target for mockery. MacLaine plays her with a mix of charm, fragility and determined dignity, illuminating how Ginnie’s inability to hide behind a socially acceptable veneer makes her the movie’s true hero.

Director: Billy Wilder

MacLaine is Fran Kubelik: the elevator operator upon whom sweet insurance drudge C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is harbouring an enormous crush, and with whom his manager Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) is having a sordid affair. Fran knows her romance with Jeff is wrong, and that he’ll never leave his wife. She wishes she could feel the same way about Baxter as he does her. Nevertheless, much to her torment, the heart wants what it wants. Jack Lemmon is the putative star of The Apartment, but MacLaine has the richer role, wrenchingly showing the loneliness and many-levelled despair beneath Fran’s cheerful smile.

Director: William Wyler

Martha (MacLaine) and Karen (Audrey Hepburn) are old friends who run a boarding school for girls together. When one of the girls maliciously starts a rumour that she saw the two of them kissing, their lives are turned upside down – and making it all the more complicated is that Martha actually does have romantic feelings for Karen. MacLaine is deeply moving as an increasingly desperate woman not afforded the opportunity to deal with her most private feelings privately. Though the still-just-about-in-existence Hays Code meant the production had to be coy when approaching their sexuality, MacLaine and Hepburn made their characters’ emotions achingly legible.

Director: Billy Wilder

Reteaming MacLaine with her director and co-star from The Apartment, Irma la Douce (Irma the Sweet) finds her in Paris, where she is the eponymous streetwalker. Lemmon plays the ex-policeman who becomes her pimp, and – thanks to an intricate system of disguises and trapdoors – eventually her sole client. While, at two and a half hours, this Billy Wilder comedy is arguably overlong, the stars’ warm, effortless chemistry makes that runtime easy to live with. MacLaine is radiant as Irma, accomplishing the difficult task of making it believable that she’s been canny enough to have survived in her tough business for so long, but yet not canny enough to realise that her new wealthy john is her boyfriend with an eyepatch, moustache and a funny accent.

Director: J. Lee Thompson

In this starry, fluffy romp, MacLaine plays Louisa May Foster, a four-time widow who has an unfortunate habit of making her husbands become wildly rich and successful before then dying. MacLaine wears 72 different Edith Head designed costumes in What a Way to Go! (the equivalent of a change roughly every 90 seconds), a movie that was intended as a Marilyn Monroe vehicle before her death in 1962. Though the sets and gowns are spectacular, and so are her co-stars (her on-screen husbands included Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum and Gene Kelly), MacLaine keeps the extravaganza anchored with an abundance of charm. She’s particularly great in an elaborate dance number with Kelly, a callback to her chorus girl days.

Director: Bob Fosse

Charity Hope Valentine (MacLaine) – rarely has a middle name been so apt – is a golden-hearted dancehall hostess who just wants to be loved. Bob Fosse’s directorial debut follows her through a host of romantic misadventures in NYC, as she keeps getting knocked down by life, and relentlessly getting straight back up again. MacLaine played a lot of sweet-natured naifs in the first part of her career, but none were quite so heartbreaking as Charity. It takes guts to wear your heart so very much on your sleeve, to keep ploughing forward even after endless setbacks, and MacLaine makes Charity’s brave vulnerability vivid and unforgettable.

Director: Herbert Ross

Deedee (MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) were professional ballerinas together in New York. Then the former got pregnant and left to continue her family in Oklahoma City; the latter kept dancing and became famous. When the troupe returns to perform in Deedee’s hometown years later, the two meet again. Old wounds are reopened, as both envy each other for the lives they could have had. MacLaine is terrific as a woman whose long-stewing jealousy was always going to bubble over, despite her well-intentioned efforts to keep it tamped down – her resultant fight scene with Bancroft, on the roof of Carnegie Hall, is a phenomenal fusion of catharsis and delightful physical comedy.

Director: Hal Ashby

Like almost every supporting character in Being There, Eve Rand (MacLaine) considers Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers) a genius, when in fact he is a man with the brain of a child, who has a propensity for banal statements that can be interpreted as sage-like wisdom. As the much younger wife of a dying mogul, who falls in love with Chauncey, Eve should have been ripe for ridicule. Although she does often look silly (including during the infamous masturbation scene), MacLaine doesn’t allow her to become simply a caricature either, investing her loneliness and complicated love for her husband with a genuine emotional weight.

Director: James L. Brooks

MacLaine and Debra Winger had a notoriously tumultuous time with each other during the shooting of Terms of Endearment, but it didn’t damage their performances; in fact, considering the difficult mother-daughter relationship of their characters, it may even have helped them. MacLaine plays Aurora as both intimidating and deeply unsure of herself, whose neuroses manifest both in scattershot spurts of cruelty and of ferocious love. Besides enacting that fractious maternal bond, she’s also endearingly vulnerable in her tentative relationship with Jack Nicholson’s over-the-hill playboy astronaut. The two have a tremendous, if offbeat chemistry, and would go on to reprise their roles in 1996’s The Evening Star.

Director: Herbert Ross

Everyone sighs when they see MacLaine’s Ouiser Boudreaux storming towards them, but she’s an integral member of the tight-knit group of six Southern women who give the beloved weepie its title. “I’m not crazy, I’ve just been in a very bad mood for 40 years!” is how Ouiser self-describes her bullish demeanour, and a lot of the fun of MacLaine’s performance is in watching her stomp around grouchily, cutting through niceties and telling everyone exactly what she thinks . Yet, as she had in Terms of Endearment, MacLaine readily finds the tender heart of the irascible character, which adds a real richness to a performance that’s much more than comic relief.