Shirley MacLaine’s first screen role was in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film “The Trouble with Harry”, and she currently has two films in the can yet to be released.
That eight-decade career span, from the 1950s to the 2020s, is certainly rare in Hollywood, and the 86-year-old screen icon recently spoke with Variety in a wide-ranging interview.
One of the topics she touched on was the incredible longevity of her career, and she shared the secret.
“Even though I tell people the truth, I’m not a diva,” she said.
“That comes from my three-year-old ballet training. I’ve got to go all the way back to that and just hard, honest work, with quite a bit of art if you can muster it, thrown in.
“I’ve also stayed in the business and never thought about quitting because I wanted to pay for plane tickets to travel,” added the Oscar winner. “I didn’t socialize Hollywood-style. I’d rather travel to a country I hadn’t been to. So when I think about my life, I’m not sure I wouldn’t put the travels a bit above show business.”
She also revealed what it was like to work for Hitchcock in her very first film, when she was just 18.
“I always had a chorus girl attitude. He’s the director. He’s the boss. That’s what I had learned since I was three, even though I had learned to defend whatever objection I had to whatever was going on,” she explained.
According to MacLaine, Hitchcock took a shine to her.
“He wouldn’t eat a meal without me,” she revealed. “I gained 25 pounds on that movie… We would talk, and he would tell me stories, and he would get very sophisticatedly cynical. And I would think it was funny, and he would be glad that I got it.”
