The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (261 page)

Shirley MacLaine
(Shirley Mclean Beaty), b. Richmond, Virginia, 1934
Over the years, the making of this book has brought me so much pleasure. Perhaps a lifetime of misspent youth has amounted to something. Going back over the movies, there are so many memories. In attempting to see shape in the history of motion pictures there is a steady battle between scholarship and partiality, enough to suggest that learning is often more warped than it realizes, while daft enthusiasms do lead to quantities of obscure knowledge. There have been moments of revelation, comedy, excitement, and the grim accumulation of experience, of all those frames gone by. We have faced them at the Granada, Tooting, and at screening rooms in the Thalberg Building. The author may begin to regard himself solemnly. But then, as comeuppance, without undue incredulity, malice, or frenzy, a grown man is required to sit down and compose a thousand or so words on Shirley MacLaine. Yes, that career has really happened; that energy has flowed.

She is the older sister of Warren Beatty, a relationship that seems to have been powerful and stimulating when they were young, and a source of friction and perplexity later. MacLaine the beginner was very impressive: she had smart bounce, a sense of humor, and a wicked streak that made her short red hair seem tomboyish. She was a dancer, who replaced Carol Haney in the Broadway production of
The Pajama Game
in 1954.

Hal Wallis signed her up and she made her debut, as auburn as the New England fall, in
The Trouble with Harry
(55, Alfred Hitchcock). She danced a little in
Artists and Models
(55, Frank Tashlin) and scooped the female lead in
Around the World in 80 Days
(56, Michael Anderson). After
Hot Spell
(57, Daniel Mann) and
The Matchmaker
(58, Joseph Anthony), she was as good as she has ever been as the tart in
Some Came Running
(58, Vincente Minnelli) and in
Ask Any Girl
(59, Charles Walters)—the first a smalltown drama that is badly underrated, the second a pleasant comedy.

Neither
Career
(59, Anthony) nor
Can-Can
(60, Walter Lang) did much for her, but
The Apartment
(60, Billy Wilder) was a turning point: she was funny and touching to be sure, but there were signs of self-indulgence in her playing of the exploited elevator-girl, Fran Kubelik, subtly abetting Wilder’s distaste for women. None of Wilder’s tacked on happy endings seems as craven or unconvincing as MacLaine’s headlong, back-projected run into the arms of Lemmon’s Baxter. The self-destructive sentiment of Fran is too strong for the trite compromise, and Wilder’s vision hardly comprehends a love that has no solid commercial motive.

In the 1960s, her choice of parts, not to mention her playing, seemed increasingly casual and mistaken:
Two Loves
(61, Walters); as the L—n in
The Children’s Hour
(62, William Wyler);
My Geisha
(62, Jack Cardiff), produced by her husband, Steve Parker, and indulging her interest in Japan; self-consciously pathetic in
Two for the Seesaw
(63, Robert Wise); and
Irma la Douce
(63, Wilder).

By then, her kooky girl was becoming excessive, predictable, and a barrier to her former impishness. She needed more ambitious parts and more implacable directors than were generally available. For many years the earnestness of her screen character was borne out in life by her work for the Democratic party. She wrote an amusing book and did a TV series,
Shirley’s World
, to divert her from some lame movies:
What a Way to Go
(64, J. Lee Thompson);
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home
(64, Thompson);
Gambit
(66, Ronald Neame);
Woman Times Seven
(67, Vittorio de Sica);
Sweet Charity
(68, Bob Fosse), based on Fellini’s
Cabiria; The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom
(68, Joseph McGrath);
Two Mules for Sister Sara
(69, Don Siegel); and
Desperate Characters
(70, Frank D. Gilroy).

She was a middle-aged woman overtaken by the occult in
The Possession of Joel Delaney
(71, Waris Hussein). Then, after a long interval during which she did everything on the documentary
The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir
(74), she seemed overimpressed with the superficial earnestness of
The Turning Point
(77, Herbert Ross), in which she pandered to any woman who had ever given up a career too demanding for middle-class attitudes.

She was in
Being There
(79, Hal Ashby);
Loving Couples
(80, Jack Smight);
A Change of Seasons
(80, Richard Lang)—before a lively comeback as Aurora Greenaway in
Terms of Endearment
(83, James L. Brooks), for which she won the best actress Oscar. At the same time, she was running a second career as the author of several books that were variously autobiographical and inspirational. She was frank about her own life (her accounts of dealing with her parents and her brother are well done) and hopeful about the further horizons of re-and preincarnation. The more daft this image, the more serious she became. It took that to go without flinching into playing herself for television in the risible
Out on a Limb
(87, Robert Butler).

Since then, she played
Madame Sousatzka
(88, John Schlesinger);
Steel Magnolias
(89, Ross); in
Waiting for the Light
(90, Christopher Monger); as the mother in
Postcards from the Edge
(90, Mike Nichols), a role based in fact on Debbie Reynolds; doing a cameo in
Defending Your Life
(91, Albert Brooks);
Used People
(92, Beeban Kidron);
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway
(93, Randa Haines); and
Guarding Tess
(94, Hugh Wilson).

It is said that she has been trying to mount a film in which she would play Louise Brooks in the last decade or so of her life. As her character cried out, long ago, in
Some Came Running:
“You gotta remember, I’m human.” And more.

The closest she has come to Brooks has been narrating the documentary
Looking for Lulu
(98, Barry Paris)—but there is time enough still. Meanwhile, she has also made
The West Side Waltz
(95, Ernest Thompson);
Mrs. Winterbourne
(96, Richard Benjamin); as Aurora again in
The Evening Star
(96, Robert Harling);
A Smile Like Yours
(97, Keith Samples);
Joan of Arc
(99, Christian Duguay);
Bruno
(00, which she directed herself);
These Old Broads
(01, Matthew Diamond); as Rebecca Nurse in
Salem Witch Trials
(01, Joseph Sargent);
Carolina
(02, Marleen Gorris). She had the Agnes Moorehead role in
Bewitched
(05, Nora Ephron);
In Her Shoes
(05, Curtis Hanson);
Rumor Has It…
(05, Rob Reiner);
Closing the Ring
(07, Richard Attenborough); winning prizes as the older Chanel in
Coco Chanel
(08, Duguay) for TV.

Fred MacMurray
(1908–91), b. Kankakee, Illinois
The ingredients of the MacMurray man are paradoxical but consistent: brittle cheerfulness; an anxious smile that subsides into slyness; a voice that tries to be jocular and easygoing but comes out fraudulent; the semblance of a masculine carriage that turns insubstantial and shifty. In other words, MacMurray is a romantic lead built on quicksand, a hero compelled to betray, a lover likely to desert.

In Hollywood this has been a rare character and MacMurray let the tawdry con-man grin through the all-American wholesomeness with a rare conjurer’s swiftness so that the ear and eye suspected a dud despite every protestation of the script. For, sadly, Hollywood allowed him very few truly flawed characters: the insurance agent in
Double Indemnity
(44, Billy Wilder) urged into danger by the brazen Barbara Stanwyck; as Keefer, cowardly mischief maker in
The Caine Mutiny
(54, Edward Dmytryk); as a crooked cop entranced by Kim Novak in
Pushover
(54, Richard Quine); and as Sheldrake, the chronic exploiter, in
The Apartment
(60, Billy Wilder). Here are four memorable versions of a counterfeit nice guy in which the crispness of a new bank note turns sodden and limp once it is put down in spilt gin.

Against that, one has to set a lifetime of hollow good cheer. MacMurray began as a musician, crooner, and bit-part player before Paramount signed him up in 1934, originally as a male lead for Claudette Colbert in
The Gilded Lily
(35, Wesley Ruggles). He came on fast in
Alice Adams
(35, George Stevens) and
Hands Across the Table
(35, Mitchell Leisen, for whom he worked nine times). Paramount tried to vary his modern-dress smartness in
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
(36, Henry Hathaway),
The Texas Rangers
(36, King Vidor), and
Maid of Salem
(37, Frank Lloyd), but the penthouse belt was his natural milieu:
Thirteen Hours by Air
(36, Leisen);
The Princess Comes Across
(36, William K. Howard);
Champagne Waltz
(37, Edward Sutherland); and brilliantly weak in
Swing High, Swing Low
(37, Leisen). He was with Ray Milland (an exact contemporary at Paramount) in
Men With Wings
(38, William Wellman) and carried on in
Sing You Sinners
(38, Ruggles);
Café Society
(39, Edward H. Griffith);
Invitation to Happiness
(39, Ruggles);
Honeymoon in Bali
(39, Griffith);
Remember the Night
(40, Leisen); and
Little Old New York
(40, Henry King).

He worked throughout the war, at home and on loan, without ever becoming a major star:
Virginia
(41, Griffith);
New York Town
(41, Charles Vidor);
Dive Bomber
(41, Michael Curtiz);
The Lady Is Willing
(42, Leisen); the male secretary in
Take a Letter, Darling
(42, Leisen);
The Forest Rangers
(42, George Marshall);
Above Suspicion
(43, Richard Thorpe);
No Time for Love
(43, Leisen);
Standing Room Only
(44, Sidney Lanfield);
And the Angels Sing
(44, Marshall);
Practically Yours
(44, Leisen);
Murder He Says
(45, Marshall); and
Captain Eddie
(45, Lloyd Bacon).

Briefly, in 1945, MacMurray had joined Fox, but after
Smoky
(46, Louis King) he went back to Paramount for
Suddenly It’s Spring
(47, Leisen). Restlessness indicated a decline in his drawing power and he was forced to take work where he could:
The Egg and I
(47, Chester Erskine)—a big hit;
Singapore
(47, John Brahm);
The Miracle of the Bells
(48, Irving Pichel); and
An Innocent Affair
(48, Bacon).

After 1949, he found himself in inane comedies, routine adventure films, or tired women’s pictures: apart from
The Caine Mutiny
and
Pushover
, he made
Woman’s World
(54) and
Rains of Ranchipur
(55)—both for Jean Negulesco;
The Far Horizons
(55, Rudolph Maté);
There’s Always Tomorrow
(56, Douglas Sirk); and then a string of cheap Westerns of which
Gun for a Coward
(57, Abner Biberman) and
Face of a Fugitive
(59, Paul Wendkos) are above average.

Two things rescued MacMurray’s decline: a TV series,
My Three Sons
, which installed him as a consumer father such as the real MacMurray could have sold door-to-door; and, in the cinema, the favor of Walt Disney, who chose him as the older man kids would love to trust. It says something for stamina that MacMurray’s smile stayed straight through
The AbsentMinded Professor
(61, Robert Stevenson);
Bon Voyage!
(62, James Neilson);
Son of Flubber
(63, Stevenson);
Follow Me, Boys
(66, Norman Tokar);
The Happiest Millionaire
(67, Tokar);
Charley and the Angel
(73, Vincent McEveety);
The Chadwick Family
(74, David Lowell Rich);
Beyond the Bermuda Triangle
(75, William A. Graham); and in
The Swarm
(78, Irwin Allen).

William H
. (Hall)
Macy
, b. Miami, Florida, 1950
There’s not a lot William H. Macy can’t do—except relax, or seem at ease: he has been a frequent voice in television commercials; he is a reliable supporting actor who rises easily to the chance of lead parts; and he is a good writer. He is something of a disciple of David Mamet (he was Mamet’s student at Goddard College, and he later formed a theatre company with him), but he is just as available for the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, and any film prepared to let a parch-faced actor explore insecurity and plain American worrying.

As well as films and stage (notably Teach in
American Buffalo
), he has done a lot of television, with an ongoing role on
ER
. He made his movie debut in
Somewhere in Time
(80, Jeannot Szwarc), and then did
Without a Trace
(83, Stanley R. Jaffe); a voice in
Radio Days
(87, Woody Allen);
House of Games
(87, Mamet); on television in
The Murder of Mary Phagan
(88, Billy Hale);
Things Change
(88, Mamet);
Homicide
(91, Mamet);
Shadows and Fog
(92, Allen);
Benny & Joon
(93, Jeremiah Chechik);
Twenty Bucks
(93, Keva Rosenfeld);
Searching for Bobby Fischer
(93, Steven Zaillian);
Being Human
(93, Bill Forsyth).