Saturdays with the Stars: Shirley MacLaine

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we took a look at Hitchcock's legendary goddess Grace Kelly, who would remain his favorite actress that he worked with in his career.  This month, we're going to talk about an actress of Kelly's era, but who could not be more different than the future princess, and isomeone more in the league of Carole Lombard than Grace Kelly when you think of his career.  This month, our star is Shirley MacLaine.

MacLaine was born in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of educators (her father of psychology, her mother of drama), and the older sister of Hollywood legend Warren Beatty.  Her first love was not acting, but instead dance-MacLaine trained as a ballerina (and would obviously dance in a number of roles that would happen later), and would have pursued dance but she felt she was too tall.  Instead, she went to Broadway, got cast in the chorus of Oklahoma! and got her big break when Carol Haney dropped out of The Pajama Game (MacLaine was her understudy), and she got the part, which eventually led to a contract with Paramount.

Shirley MacLaine is my all-time favorite actress, and I've seen a lot of her movies.  This is a month I am going to enjoy, though, because while I have never seen a Shirley movie I didn't enjoy, she has had an incredible career spanning nearly 70 years (she still makes movies regularly) and there are lots of important films throughout her decades of stardom that I haven't seen, including her screen debut as Hitch's leading woman in The Trouble with Harry.  MacLaine might be the first actress we'll profile for this year's series who has genuinely done lots of interviews, not just about Hitchcock but about her whole career, so it's easy to find clips & information about her relationship with him (from what I surmise, she liked him, though she did agree that he didn't care for actors and that he was a bit puzzling as a director, though the stories she tells about production of the film sound like he's bordering on cruelty to the actors).  Either way, we'll kick off this month with Harry and then from there take a brief look into the extraordinary career of Shirley MacLaine.