Year of the comeback for enduring MacLaine

Shirley MacLaine (right) and Jennifer Aniston in a scene from 'Rumour Has It'.

LOS ANGELES - She's still here. Generations of ingenues, leading ladies and character actresses have come and gone since Shirley MacLaine made her film debut at age 21 in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry." (Where is Debra Winger, for example, who made her eventual Oscar-winning co-star so miserable on the set of 1983's "Terms of Endearment?")

Now, 50 years later, MacLaine, at age 71, is having one of those comeback years when everything is going right.

The diminutive redhead stole the Premiere Women in Hollywood show in September from her fellow honourees Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron and Rachel Weisz, when they all insisted on paying her tribute. She stole Curtis Hanson's "In Her Shoes" from Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette and might land her second Oscar for it. She steals Rob Reiner's "Rumour Has It," which opens Christmas Day, from Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner. And she's enjoying every minute of it. "Meryl (Streep) can't age anymore," she says, smiling impishly. "If she decides to become 65, I won't get first crack at the scripts."

This year's return to the big-screen limelight came after a career drought for MacLaine. She had held high hopes for 1996's "Evening Star," the sequel to "Terms of Endearment," but it flopped, as did the family drama "Bruno," her directing debut.

After several TV movies, her big-screen comeback began with her tiny role as the witchy Endora in Nora Ephron's summer comedy "Bewitched," opposite Nicole Kidman ("a seriously talented alien; she can become any human you want") and Michael Caine. "I dream one day that I will play Endora," she quips now. "There is a lot of stuff on the floor of Michael and me. Our wedding is out."

How does she account for her longevity? "I can read, thank God," she says, biting into an oatmeal raisin cookie. "I can see that these characters are not eccentric old ladies. Unlike a couple of actresses my age, I'll come in and read. It's about whether directors feel comfortable with me. They don't know me. They think, 'She's so strange, what's she like?' Curtis didn't know if I could do that understated grandmother in 'In Her Shoes.' So I met with him."

When MacLaine first signed up to star in "Rumour Has It," she was impressed by writer-turned-director Ted Griffin's ingenious script about the "real" Pasadena people on whom "The Graduate" was based. "Ted's mother knew the real Mrs. Robinson," says MacLaine, who plays an older version of the Anne Bancroft character. Weeks into filming, MacLaine got a call from her agent, Jeff Berg, telling her that Griffin was off the movie. "I don't know why he got fired," she says. "Nobody told me and Kevin and Jennifer." But she was fine with Griffin's replacement, she says: "Rob is so good."

While her co-star Aniston is "talented," MacLaine says, she worries about the relentless media spotlight on the young actress, which exceeds anything that MacLaine ever faced, even at the height of her Rat Pack celebrity, when she hung out in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. "It was a different culture then," MacLaine says. "I did tell (the paparazzi) to go shove it. Whatever little invasion of privacy (I face), it was nothing compared to what these kids go through. Cameron couldn't get out of her house in the morning, and that was nothing like what Jennifer had to go through. It touches my heart."

What can Aniston do about it? "What she will become depends on how she decides to deal with this public scrutiny," MacLaine says.

Today's generation of young actresses also must deal with the pressure to be "too thin," MacLaine says. "One chocolate chip cookie a month is insane. I worry about them marketing their bodies, hair, shoes and the bags they wear. I was on the worst-dressed list every year. I prided myself on that. And what will they do with their love lives and biological clocks and impulses to be mothers? I was so young when I had my children, I wasn't old enough to know what I was doing. By my 30s I was going through my first comeback."

MacLaine credits a "more normal childhood" for how she and her brother, Warren Beatty, turned out: "When you look at what's going on today, our life doesn't seem that crazy anymore. I feel well-grounded, and so is Warren. He's grown into a conservative gentleman."

Living away from Los Angeles on her Santa Fe ranch helps her a lot, says MacLaine, who still maintains an oceanfront pad in Malibu. "L.A. isolates people's souls," she says. "The traffic is maddening. The restaurants are so loud that people fight to be social with each other. I like the mountains, purely for my own peace and stability."

At the ranch she can hike every day with her dogs. (She has 12.) "It becomes an entertainment," she says. "Krishna walked four hours every day and did not have a single thought. I can't do that. I'm working on that."

A trained dancer who could hold her own in a Bob Fosse musical ("Sweet Charity"), MacLaine "hates exercise," she says. "I do it because I have to. I look at the physical stuff as preparation for some performance."

MacLaine has never been one for excess. "I smoked two joints in my life," she says. "I ate all the furniture in the hotel both times. I never did a line of coke. I could have, but I didn't want to lose control. I never drank that much. After three Mai Tais at Trader Vic's my head went into my plate."

Up next spring is a movie for Richard Attenborough, "Closing the Ring," about a "woman who has to return to Ireland to find out what happened to her long-lost love from the second World War," she says. "Dickie's wanted to do it for years and came to me three years ago -- long before any of this happened to me."

When she isn't making movies, MacLaine has several other lucrative careers, including webmaster of her official site, www.shirleymaclaine.com, which costs $9.99 a month to join. Membership provides a monthly ShirleyGram newsletter and a weekly Sunday Independent Expression radiocast on topics ranging from meditation, spirituality, numerology and astrology to ageing, health and organic recipes, plus links to chat rooms and gift ideas, including Shirley's World Shopping.

While MacLaine can imagine herself pulling an Elaine Stritch and returning to the Broadway stage in a one-woman show -- "I have pictures in my head," she says, "I can see myself in a black dress in the spotlight" -- the reality of what it would demand of her is daunting. "You have no idea what it is like to get up there eight times a week," she says. "You have no other life. You have to be in such physical, mental and psychological shape."

For now, the non-fiction author is beavering away on her 12th book, "Staging, Not Ageing," which she is writing on spec, as always. She doesn't do fiction, she says, because as she puts it, "My life is a fiction."

- REUTERS/Hollywood Reporter