#Meryl streep shirley maclaine movie cracker#
#Meryl streep shirley maclaine movie tv#

What, because you're famous and she didn't want to upset the talent? MacLaine once put it on a chair and invited an estate agent who was trying to win business from her to sit down. For example, in among the clutter on her coffee table is a joke coffee cup with fake liquid spilling out of it that looks very real. She talks about celebrity in a way other celebrities do not – the insecurity, the neediness of her peers, the fact you cannot, in most cases, be an A-list actor without being at some level a nutcase. She is very smart, of course, and inclined to pick up on stupid questions. One is warned, as an interviewer, about Shirley MacLaine. Images: Everett/Rex Cinetext/Allstar (2) Kobal Collection There was one particular scene, a wedding in a church… hang on, who gets married?!įrom right: with Michael Caine in Gambit (1966) in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1965) with Peter Sellers in Woman Seven Times (1967) with Jack Lemmon in The Apartment (1960). She goes over there to say, 'Rethink your attitudes about tradition!'' She has known Dame Maggie for almost 40 years and what a delight it is, she says, to sit around on set all day, 'two senior citizens', gossiping. Or, as MacLaine puts it as we sit down in her living room, 'My character is not crass, but more emotionally democratic than the English. MacLaine will play Martha Levinson, Lady Cora's mother, sweeping in from New York to upset the household.

#Meryl streep shirley maclaine movie tv#

This autumn, MacLaine appears opposite Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, the kind of shark versus bear pairing TV execs only dream about and that, for incongruity, is right up there with the time Liz Taylor appeared in a Miss Marple.

#Meryl streep shirley maclaine movie cracker#

We're at her pied-à-terre in Malibu – she lives most of the time on a ranch in New Mexico – a bungalow overlooking the ocean in a secure development popular with celebrities, she says, because of the anonymity although, when she calls me a cab at the end of the interview, she says blithely down the phone, 'Hello, it's Shirley MacLaine', then stands in the driveway, eating a cracker and waving at the driver as he turns in the drive. Shirley MacLaine comes to the door in slippers and a tracksuit, clutching a fistful of hair and looking, at 78, like an only slightly older version of those famous 1960s roles of hers: gleeful, sharp-eyed, almost confrontationally scatty.