At 52 Shirley MacLaine stars in her best role

Press, 10 January 1987, Page 12

At 52 Shirley MacLaine stars in her best role

“Dancing in the Light” is the latest book in a series of very personal revelations penned by the Hollywood actress, Shirley MacLaine. ADRIAN WOODHOUSE meets the star with the wicked glint in her eyes.

Shirley MacLaine is putting four little jewelled studs into her left ear. From her earlobe upwards, they go red, green, red, green as if she were some kind of walking traffic lights. She is putting them in without looking in a mirror. “I can put anything in without looking,” she says and gives a laugh that would stop traffic and send grown men running for cover.

At 52, Hollywood’s favourite lady of independent mind still looks pretty dazzling even though it is 30 years since she stepped out of the chorus line of “The Pyjama Game” on Broadway to take over a lead part and came back a star. Her hair, no longer red but a sort of dusky pink, is cropped close to preserve the gamine face. Although there are now crowsfeet around her eyes, her figure is a trim tribute to her daily yoga and exercises. Her dancer’s legs, decked out in leather mini-skirt and black stockings, are as glorious as ever they were when she played “Irma La Douce,” the tart with the heart.

Having successfully made the screen transition from lovable zany to serious character actress, she still acts with distinction in a big film every few years — the ballet film, “Turning Point,” “Being There” with Peter Sellers, her Oscar-winning performance in “Terms of Endearment.” She also still occasionally goes out on the road with her song and dance act. But she mainly makes a very good living out of writing about and. taking the part of — Shirley MacLaine.

Her first two books of autobiography, “Don’t Fall off the Mountain,” and “You can get there from here,” were bestsellers many years ago. Then, at the beginning of the 1980 s, she wrote “Out on a Limb” which she ingenuously described as being “about the experience of getting in touch with myself when I was in my early 40s. it is about the connection between mind, body and spirit.” In America, where they are fond of middle-aged actresses who write about such things, it was a top seller, and she has just turned it into a five-hour television film, shot in London and Hawaii. She wrote and co-produced it, with Robert Butler, director of television’s “Remington Steele,” as her director. She also chose actor Charles Dance to play Gerry, the “British Labour member of Parliament” with whom she had a steamy love affair.

“I think he is marvellous,” says Miss MacLaine

with a wicked glint in her eyes. And I just love his strawberry-blond hair.” The MacLaine-on-Mac-Laine industry moves on. “Dancing in the Light,” her latest volume of autobiographical self-search-ing, has just been published. It went straight to the top of the United States bestseller lists and stayed there. In the new volume there is more about the MacLaine lovelife, this time a long on-off affair with a Russian hunk who she calls Vassy. But chiefly the book is a lengthy description of Shirley MacLaine’s experiences with psychics, meditation, Zen, acupuncture and a whole host of extra-sensory experiences. Cynics may scoff, but there is no doubt that an awful lot of people find

her experiences fascinating. She tours and talks about them across the United States to large audiences. Which all helps to sell MacLaine on MacLaine. ; » i - Does she not find it difficult to write about herself and now play herself on camera? “Oh no. I keep thinking about myself in the third peson all the time. I think of me as her and after all I am a very different person from what I was in the 19705, for example.” That may explain the candour with which she now talks about herself. Her psychic quests take her all over the world — South America, Africa, Asia — but at the moment she chiefly supports a psychic commune in Sante Fe, attended by several Hollywood and United States political luminaries.

“I check in there pretty regularly.” “Check in” is a favourite term of Shirley MacLaine’s.- If she is ever away from New York for too long she has to “check in” to catch up on the city and the people there. Shev. also "checks in” with her younger brother Warfen Beatty “from time to. time.” “We don’t exactly run in the same social circles,” she says carefully. Their parents, both former teachers who came from Canada to live in Virginia not far from Washington, DC, are both still alive. Her daughter, Sachi, by a long-dissolved marriage to an American businessman, Steve Parker, is in her late 20s — “Well, that is the way she wants me to put it” — and has had a number of small parts in films since going to live

with her mother in Malibu a few years ago. “She has never acted with me, but it Would be dice, some day. We get on very well.” Shirley MacLaine is ap-' parently romantically unattached at - . the moment, though her habit of writing about past lovers in her books, does not appear to cramp her free-wheeling style. However, she is not going to follow the example of other Hollywood liberated ladies and extend her MacLaine on MacLaine industry into writing about how. she keeps herself looking so good. "I just do what is right for me and I wouldn’t presume to preach exercise routines for other people. Those things can be very dangerous you know,” she says, wrinkling her nose at the mention of Jane Fonda. ; I And yet, during the late 19605/ and early 1970 s Shirley MacLaine was an extremely active campaigner for the Leftliberal wing of American politics. Did she not think that she knew what was good for people then? She smiles, “Oh, I am still a Democrat, but I leave the screaming from the roof-tops to others now and I. am not a barricades activist anymore. I was in the ’6os and ’7os, but .1 feel that that sort of aggressive approach to politics isn’t always helpful. Come ’BB I will still be campaigning for the Democrats but my view on life has changed since those days. “Perhaps it is because I see the good in everything now. I see the inevitable, the pattern in things, I have got my life more in balance now and my experiences, my psychic experiences, have helped to achieve that balance, jl am far more ready to let life take its course now.” Live life if you can get it, for the MacLaine on MacLaine business is-ndt letting up. After the filip, "Out on a Limb” she ; is going to write a screenplay and make a film, op "Dancing in the Light.”;; "l would quite like to direct that, myself.” And if that wasn’t incestuous enough; her publisher has asked her to write another bdbft — which will include. Hetthoughts about the filming of “Out on a Limb” and how sherealiy got on with Charles Dance. ■ j i One has the feeling that Shirley MacLaine Was born under a lucky star. “Hell, lam a lucky star,” she proclaims with ■ a laugh worthy of Sunset Boulevard. Then she adds, “But I have learnt that luck is something of ybur own making.” ji iCopyright DUO.