May 22, 202406:00
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In more than a dozen books, the actress, singer and dancer Shirley MacLaine He acknowledged that his success in Hollywood happened more by chance than by genuine desire. In fact, heThe artist from Richmond, Virginia, tried to shake off the pressure that came with her name (a tribute from her parents to the actress Shirley Temple) and she responsibly approached the different classes in which her mother enrolled her, such as the ballet classes that she was so passionate about, “to show that she could be a professional,” but not necessarily with the focus on stardom. Since her youth, MacLaine wanted to improve herself and not wait for the approval of third parties, and that is how she managed herself throughout her career, with the freedom of someone who knows where her true enjoyment lies.
“I never understood the concept of being a famous person.”“I never understood what it meant to be a star, that never motivated me,” he wrote in one of his memoirs, my lucky stars. “I just wanted to be good at my job, do things well, be prepared, be creative, be a performerthat’s why when I arrived in Hollywood I didn’t have big goals, they were more limited objectives, or rather linked to encouraging my imagination through different disciplines,” he noted. MacLaine, who made her film debut with none other than Alfred Hitchcock in Who killed Harry? in 1955and who sustained an extraordinary career that, contrary to her wishes, positioned her as one of the great stars of an industry in which she dealt with scrutiny of her private life with admirable candor.
While preparing for the filming that marked his film debut with the “master of suspense,” At 22 years old, MacLaine formalized her relationship with businessman Steve Parker. In 1954, the couple married and the family was consolidated with the arrival of her first and only daughter, Sachi.
For decades, MacLaine and Parker lived their marriage with the freedom to embark on other relationships if they wished and on many occasions neglecting Sachi’s well-being, as she herself would later say. According to the actress’s daughter – who followed in her footsteps and began working in 1985 – her father was “verbally abusive” and constantly damaged her self-esteem. “She used to call me ‘the idiot’, she didn’t allow me to read and she left me alone many times, the same thing happened with my mother, who forgot about me,” Sachi declared on one occasion, when she recalled how, at 14 years old, she was stranded. in Europe because both MacLaine and Parker forgot to travel to pick her up from a boarding school on your vacation. “We were not a traditional family,” acknowledged the protagonist of Sweet Charitywho in conversation with People magazine in 2016 alluded to that time in his life with the producer.
“No one understood what we were doing, but we did. “Steve lived in Japan and I was in the United States all the time, that’s how things were, each to their own.” MacLaine revealed that this gap made them rethink how to live a marriage without strings attached. “For the relationship to last, we knew we had to open up the couple,” he declared, albeit with a hint of regret. “Maybe the best thing would have been to just be friends, so we would have avoided talking about sex, but we decided to be very honest with each other, I told him everything about my life and he always did the same, we understood each other that way,” he said. the actress, who She divorced Parker in 1982, after 28 years of marriage.
The businessman died on May 13, 2001 and MacLaine faced the reality he had been avoiding: the bond with his daughter. “She was an absent mother,” he said. Sachi in a television interview. “For a long time I had traumas with loneliness and abandonment,” she added. Time and countless conversations brought mother and daughter closer, especially when Shirley became a grandmother and began spending more time with Sachi and her grandchildren, Arin and Frank. “The family healed thanks to the fact that we were able to tell each other everything frankly,” they said in statements to the press.
Shirley MacLaine, on her marriage to Steve Parker, her only husband
When he remembers Parker, MacLaine does so with extreme devotion. “I had my first significant relationship with him and he was the man who mattered most to me in my life,” she expressed and underlined how the codes of their marriage allowed them both to enjoy their personal desires. “He needed to position himself in his work and I was from one side to the other in Hollywood, we were free souls,” he explained. the actress who was linked to different figures, from artists Yves Montand and Dean Martinpassing through the former Foreign Minister of Australia, Andrew Peacock, to the former Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme.
“I had horrible lovers.”MacLaine confided to the publication The Mirror, in relation to those ties in which she advanced because she had agreed to do so with her husband, who also had affairs that he told the actress about. According to the testimony of the Oscar winner, she established “many relationships” throughout of his life and also He indulged in nights of “sexual debauchery” that he ended up regretting. “In a political campaign everyone did it,” he said, regarding the sexual experimentation that arose when he turned to activism. “I didn’t want to miss anything or be left out, so in one day I had sex with three men, but it was a stupid decision, since it didn’t satisfy me in the slightest,” she expressed candidly.
On the other hand, MacLaine confessed that he fell in love easily, especially with his colleagues, except for Jack Lemmon (with whom he formed an unforgettable duo in the films of the great Billy Wilder, Apartment and Irma the sweet) and Jack Nicholson (his partner in The strength of affection and its unnecessary sequel, Life goes on). “I always found my coworkers very attractive, the actors have that amount of intrigue that made me fall in love many times over 30 years,” confessed the actress, who was linked to Frank Sinatraa rumor that he denied with a curious fact.
“Frank (with whom he starred Some Came Running by Vincente Minnelli) was not exactly the kind of man I liked, he was very small, very skinny, very short. “I was attracted to complicated men, the most robust, like Mitchum,” he revealed. Indeed, MacLaine and his film colleague Any day on any corner and What a Way to Go!, the extraordinary Robert MitchumThey had a romance that lasted three years..
When Mitchum and MacLaine fell in love in 1962 on the set of Any day on any cornerthey did not avoid what was happening to them and They gave themselves over to a bond that lasted longer than expected, especially for the actress, who assured that his colleague was “a very complex person, an enigma to solve.” In her memoirs, Shirley described him as a man “multifaceted, shy and ironic” in his manner. “That shyness was taken to extremes,” MacLaine elaborated and added: “He was not able to express what he wanted for his life, “I was detached from everything, it became a project for me, a job.” Mitchum was married to his longtime girlfriend – and with whom he remained until the moment of her death -, Dorothy Spence, but he had romances with both MacLaine and Ava Gardner and Lucille Ball, among other figures.
“Robert was an exquisite challenge, we traveled the world together, and I fell in love with his intricacies.” In any case, three years were enough for the actress, who He ended up getting fed up with Mitchum’s “cowardice”. “For a long time I was interested in the origins of this excessive cowardice, but when he started systematically behaving that way he took me to the opposite pole and I no longer found him attractive,” the actress wrote.
In conversation with Oprah Winfrey, MacLaine confessed that she never fell in love with sweet men. “That’s why I wasn’t attracted to Jack (Lemmon) because he was a charming person, and I liked those men who I had to fix in some way, who I had to decipher, sexually dominant individuals, complex, dangerous, although to a certain extent.” In any case, when asked about Jack Nicholson, the Hollywood star assured that he was his limit. “Jack was too dangerous, too much in every way, he was uncontrollable”he stated.
That relaxed way of expressing herself, both in her books and in the numerous interviews she has given in her extensive career, is one of Shirley MacLaine’s hallmarks.a woman who does not avoid revisiting her life and reflecting on what motivated her to undertake different adventures, such as the case of those romances that not only did she not hide but about which she expanded with a naturalness that is unusual in Hollywood, where appearances usually prevail. .
As a result, every time he has to choose his favorite character in his filmography, he never hesitates. “She will always be Aurora,” she expressed more than once, referring to Aurora Greenway, her role in The strength of affectiona woman in whom she saw herself represented. “She understood herself, she stood for what she wanted, and she did it with humor, with angeralways wanting to move forward to see what was happening with her life instead of adopting a passivity about it,” remarked MacLaine, who shares with Aurora that reckless attitude, free of impositions and extremely energetic.
