We’re doing another very old actor this month at Make the Case with Shirley MacLaine and what I think are the 7 best movies of a career that began the same year my mom was born in 1955. That’s the same year the first McDonald’s opened, and the year in which Disneyland opened its doors. This is just to give you a sense of scale of just how long Shirley has been working.
And still working at 90 years old, my goodness, with recent and exceptional appearances on shows like Only Murders in the Building. She’s still one of the most interesting on-screen performers working today, something I realized as I recently went through a very lengthy collection of her movies on the Criterion Channel.
It’s immense, and it’s such that I want to write about this work while she’s alive. Not that she or last month’s feature Anthony Hopkins read this column (I mean, probably not), but I’ve written a lot of obits in my career. It’s way, way more fun to write about these actors and artists when they’re still alive. Trust me.
And with the staggering number of people we’ve lost in 2024 alone, I feel a weird, singular anxiety to get around to these people in this column before it’s too late, and the enthusiasm is gone.
7. Terms of Endearment (1983)
Director: James L. Brooks
It’s true Shirley MacLaine won a Best Actress Oscar in 1984 for Terms of Endearment, beating out a strong field of nominees that included Meryl Streep for Silkwood and Debra Winger for the same movie as MacLaine. James L. Brooks has made some of my favorite comedies, but there’s also something about his shifts from drama to comedy that can completely stop the film in its tracks.
It’s always a risk to take a wild left turn with your audience, and Terms of Endearment has its famous shift into becoming a story of a woman (Winger, who seemingly didn’t get along great with MacLaine) and her mother dealing with the former’s shocking cancer diagnosis. Terms of Endearment is a famous tearjerker, and I’ll admit I’m not immune to that, but it’s also a movie that really drives its points and themes home a little too hard.
Terms of Endearment becomes a little burdensome by the end, but that’s offset almost completely by the extraordinary, fluid, and riveting chemistry between MacLaine and Jack Nicholson’s aging astronaut neighbor. That’s the movie I often find myself wanting to spend more time with, two of the very best of my lifetime playing off each other so well that they make their profession look extremely easy. As opposed to a movie that gets pretty pushy about its sentimentality at times.
6. Guarding Tess (1994)
Director: Hugh Wilson
Although Terms of Endearment is a far more emotionally complex film than Guarding Tess, it’s the latter that has the more interesting Shirley MacLaine performance. Playing opposite Nicolas Cage’s relatively restrained, uptight Secret Service agent protecting a fiercely determined former First Lady (MacLaine) is a good setup for a comedy with touches of drama, and while the film sometimes struggles to balance these things, especially in its stilted final act, MacLaine’s intense, brilliant Tess Carlisle is an anchor that keeps you watching.
Guarding Tess also wins me over every time for the simple fact that it’s another Shirley MacLaine movie where half the fun is just watching her play off another brilliant performer. In this case it’s Nicolas Cage, but as you find going through MacLaine’s long career, she’s had chemistry with an incredible range of actors, actresses, and styles. She herself remains distinctive and memorable and rarely outright steals the show.
With Guarding Tess though, it’s easy to focus on MacLaine’s performance so much that a fairly average movie gets a higher regard than it normally would. There’s a lot more than just a cranky old woman with a biting wit going on here, which is something I’ll be saying again before the end of this column.
Guarding Tess is a very solid comedy-drama, but MacLaine’s consistently interesting work makes it better.
5. Postcards from the Edge (1990)
Director: Mike Nichols
As a generous, sometimes willfully ignorant actress coming to terms with everything from her relationship to her daughter, to the state of her own career, Shirley MacLaine in Postcards from the Edge is a role I wish came up more often when talking about MacLaine.
Through her performance, beloved movie star Doris Mann isn’t some parody of a time and place. Or an obstacle for the daughter of her character, also a famous actress, to overcome. It helps that the film is phenomenally written by Carrie Fisher, but MacLaine’s sympathetic portrayal that also allows for the character to have distinct flaws is perhaps this excellent film’s strongest feature.
While I believe Carrie Fisher, who wrote both the novel and screenplay for Postcards from the Edge, and her assertion that neither of these things are drawn directly from her own relationship to famous mother Debbie Reynolds, I’m also always a smidgen incredulous. I just can’t help but imagine that at least some part of this story of an actress (Meryl Streep) and her at-times difficult relationship with her famous mom has at least partial roots in something from Fisher’s own life. Even if the finished product is dramatically different from reality.
Regardless, Postcards from the Edge, which Debbie Reynolds wanted to star in as Doris, features Shirley MacLaine at her best. Any scene with Meryl Streep is absorbing stuff, but what impresses me most is how MacLaine’s performance defines Doris outside of that relationship. This is someone fighting to keep up with a rapidly evolving world.
4. The Children’s Hour (1961)
Director: William Wyler
Shirley MacLaine didn’t need to prove she could be effective in something like The Children’s Hour, a harrowing, straightforward drama built on themes of repression, love, and the devastating consequences of being the subject of almost sadistic gossip and scrutiny. There’s nothing on MacLaine’s resume quite like this one.
There’s no banter or silliness in The Children’s Hour, which is something you find in a decent number of Shirley MacLaine’s movies, especially in this era. Both the play and film are loosely based on an 1810 court case that saw the lives of two women nearly destroyed (they eventually won their case) by accusations of lesbianism while running a school for young girls.
The movie doesn’t shy away from the emotionally harrowing aftermath of such claims, or the consequences, showing both MacLaine and Hepburn trying and failing to prove their innocence. This innocence turns out to be a complicated matter in itself, with MacLane delivering a heartbreaking, profound mediation on living in the closet with someone she loves more than anything. It’s a big scene for a sad, complex character, and MacLaine absolutely nails it opposite Hepburn and an underrated James Garner.
I can’t help but be a little impressed that a movie dealing with the plot and themes tackled by The Children’s Hour was made in Hollywood during the 1960s. Then you learn that William Wyler had already made a film out of Lillian Hellman’s controversial 1934 play of the same in 1936 as These Three, and you’re reminded that people have been telling these stories for a very long time.
3. Bernie (2011)
Director: Richard Linklater
Once again tapping into an ability to work with seemingly anyone, Shirley MacLaine’s scenes with Jack Black, playing two real-life people who had at best a deeply dysfunctional relationship before its sudden, severe termination, are powerful moments between two deeply talented actors. Bernie isn’t a perfectly-told film narrative, but it does have one of MacLaine’s darkest and most tragic characterizations.
You can always get me in the mood to talk about Richard Linklater, very prominent among my favorite filmmakers, and the 2011 dark comedy true crime docudrama Bernie is one of the best by one of the best. Shirley MacLaine playing real-life murder victim Marjorie Nugent, killed by her friend and constant companion Bernie Tiede. Tiede would be eventually found guilty for her murder, but not before spending a considerable chunk of the woman’s millions on improvements and kind gestures to people all throughout his small East Texas town. This combined with Bernie’s extreme likability among those who knew him turned him into a bit of a folk hero, and Linklater’s 2011 film explores this as much as it does the morbid details of their case and relationship.
It also doesn’t hurt Bernie’s standing, even as he currently fights for air conditioning in the East Texas prison system where he currently resides, that Marjorie Nugent was a brutally unlikable woman. Whether or not it’s true that Marjorie was kind of a monster is for you to decide. To watch Shirley MacLaine play this type of character, someone pitiable and genuinely frightening at times, is an electrifying experience.
2. Being There (1979)
Director: Hal Ashby
Before I ever get around to that, “7 Best Movies Where Oscar Winners Rub One Out” edition of Make the Case, let’s celebrate one of the best social satire films of all time, and how Shirley MacLaine’s performance as Eve Rand, the younger wife of one of the richest and most powerful political doners in the nation (the great Melvyn Douglas in one of his last films), is a significant part of why this movie still hits after 40+ years.
Being There at its most basic is a fish-out-of-water story in which a very simple gardener named Chauncey (Peter Sellers in what might be his best performance) suddenly finds himself homeless and unemployed. His aimless wandering leads him on an adventure that proves to be as surprising as it is extremely funny. MacLaine is like everyone else, believing Chauncey’s inane thoughts on gardening and television to be pearls of profound wisdom and understanding of the world. Her wonder and eventual attraction to Chauncey leads to one of the greatest sex scenes ever put to film, but MacLaine’s performance also reveals one of the most likable characters in the movie. While no one in this movie is particularly evil, her character is such that we almost want to see the Chauncey that she slowly falls in love with. Eve Rand in a lesser film with weaker casting and writing would have been simply one of the film’s numerous punchlines. In Being There, and with Shirley MacLaine in particular in the role, the character has depth and agency that only adds to the movie’s larger themes and Chauncey’s surreal journey to the top of American politics.
1. The Apartment (1960)
Director: Billy Wilder
It astonishes me that the top-tier romantic dramedy The Apartment is over 60 years old at this point. One of my favorite romantic films, and one of my favorites for a young Shirley MacLaine’s co-star Jack Lemmon, and it’s still my favorite Shirley MacLaine performance in a very long line of those examples. We didn’t even get to films like What a Way to Go, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Steel Magnolias, Madame Sousatzka, Noelle (no, I’m not kidding) and quite a few others. The Apartment still wins out for me over anything else because I love the witty, empathetic, and sometimes unflinching execution of its story of two misfits finding one another amidst a chaotic and uncaring world.
Shirley MacLaine is only one of the things that makes The Apartment all of those qualities I mentioned above, but she might be the most important piece of its enduring appeal for me. Her character is at times hapless, but she’s also brave, relentless, compassionate, and capable of being a mess that still exists outside of the fantasies of the men in the movie who love and/or want to control her. I don’t think The Apartment is a particularly feminist statement or anything in of itself, but I do think Shirley MacLaine’s performance is once again an example of her giving a character more depth than they would have otherwise possessed.
When the movie isn’t great, you see this quality in Shirley MacLaine’s performances. However, the experience is even better when the movie is as wonderful, funny, and endearingly sentimental as The Apartment. There’s more depth in its characterizations and dialog than what you might expect from a simple boy-meets-girl story. MacLaine’s talents underscore a one-of-a-kind performer who continues to grab my attention to this day.
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