Miss MacLaine waiting

Press, 14 April 1984, Page 12

Miss MacLaine waiting

NZPA-Reuter Los Angeles A tearful Shirley MacLaine cradled her first Hollywood Oscar award and declared, “I deserved this.” It was typical of the outspoken Miss MacLaine, an actress who does not believe in mumbling a humble line when honoured, who tells the world she believes in recincarnation and extraterrestrial beings, and who campaigns for planned parenthood. Miss MacLaine, who has always been her own mistress, has received Hollywood’s highest accolade after waiting 26 years. Before a star-studded audience, and an estimated televison and radio audience of 500 million people in 76 countries, she was recently voted best actress of the year for the role of a frustrated Texas widow named Aurora Greenway in the film, “Terms of Endearment.” When she had earlier received the Golden Globe award, presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for the same

role, she told her audience, “I sure deserve it. “I have wondered for 26 years what this would feel like,” she said. “Thank you for terminating this suspense.” The film, which dwells on a tempestuous, bitter-sweet relationship between mother and daughter, played by Miss MacLaine and Debra Winger, has been a big American box office success, taking more than SUS9O million ($139 million).

Miss MacLaine was first nominated for an Academy Award as best actress in 1958, for “Some Came Running.” She was nominated again for “The Apartment,” in I 960; for ‘lrma La Douce,” in 1963; and for “The Turning Point,” 1977. Each time another actress won the golden statuette. Her name had also gone forward as the producer of a documentary “The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir” which she made during a visit to China. Again, she did not win. After her success this year she thanked Jack Nicholson, who won his second Oscar for playing the film’s hard-drinking former astronaut who has an affair with Miss MacLaine. Miss MacLaine, who says of herself she has been in the business long enough to have more comebacks than most actresses, will be 50 on April 24. She began dancing at the age of two. She went from high school in Richmond, Virginia, to Broadway, in the

chorus line of “Pyjama Game.” When Hollywood discovered her soon afterwards she meditated with Indian gurus, publicly expressed her strong liberal political views, and campaigned for planned parenthood. Later she opposed the Vietnam war. She has written three best-selling autobiographical books, “Don’t Fall off the Moutain,” “You Can’t Get There From Here,” and “Out on a Limb.” In her latest book, she discusses her belief in reincarnation, spiritual revelations, and out-of-body experiences. She also told in her book of a relationship she had with a man she identified only as a socialist politician named Gerry. Ironically, her film success comes for a role of an iron-willed mother that she never played in real life. Her daughter, Sachi Parker, aged 27, went to Japan at the age of six to live with her film producer father, Steve Parker.