It has never been easy to be a woman in Hollywood. But in the industry's less politically-correct early days, Shirley MacLaine managed to do the impossible: be a girls' girl and a guys' girl, the kind who could pal around with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And during an interview at this week's Sundance Film Festival, the Oscar-winning actress revealed the secret to her incredible decades of success.
"From the beginning, I was going to be my girl," MacLaine told Vanity Fair's Executive West Coast Editor Krista Smith. "That's been my guide. . . Not that I appealed to everybody. I think I appealed to myself. . . which for a while there might have been defined as selfish or self-centered."
Where did this confidence come from-especially since MacLaine had a mother who, as MacLaine told Smith, used to apologize whenever she bumped into the furniture?
Additionally, MacLaine's father "was an intellectual, who did a masters in psychology and philosophy at Johns Hopkins-who didn't really live up to his potential," said MacLaine, in town to promote her new drama The Last Word. "They were my guides. . . what they didn't do, I wanted to do."
Her real savior, however, was dance. "I was in ballet class at the age of three," said MacLaine. "I had weak ankles that I was born with. Mom thought that it was good to go to dancing school, and I loved the music. I loved the discipline. I loved how you have to stand in alignment to not hurt yourself. So I'm learning as I get older and older what an effect the discipline and the art and the physical spirituality of being a dancer means. . . if you ask what is my real identity, it's that of a very inquisitive, spiritual dancer."