AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Shirley MacLaine (2012) DVD-R

Starring Willie Mays, Tina Andrews, Paul Frees, Ernestine Wade
Directed by Louis J. Horvitz
Print: Color
Runtime: 60 min
Genre: Documentary

Shirley MacLean Beaty was born April 24, 1934 in Richmond, Virginia. She was named for a movie star — the adorable Shirley Temple, who lifted the hearts of American moviegoers during the Great Depression as only a child star could. MacLaine was the freckled daughter of an educator and a Canadian-born actress turned teacher. She started dance class at age three to strengthen a pair of wobbly ankles and her childhood years were counted off to a dance beat — five, six, seven, eight! — MacLaine finding at the Washington School of Ballet a lifelong source of beauty, balance and belief in herself. She eagerly absorbed the lessons of her Russian-trained instructor and proved her mettle early, dancing “Cinderella” with the National Symphony. And on a broken ankle.

Before long the teenage perfectionist was waving goodbye to her kid brother Warren, boarding the bus to New York and landing jobs in corporate musicals for sales conventions, known in the dancers’ trade as “industrials.” She pirouetted around Servel Ice Boxes for a time before joining the chorus of a “subway-circuit” “Oklahoma!,” then Broadway’s “Me and Juliet.” The choreographer who hired her shouted, “You with the red hair and the legs that start at your shoulders!” An offhand remark that crystallized her image as a standout.

What came next is the stuff of legend. Carol Haney, star of the hit musical, “The Pajama Game,” suffered her own ankle injury, and MacLaine, by then her understudy, was plucked from the chorus line. When the change was announced to the matinee audience, “there was a loud sigh of disappointment,” Jerry Lewis recalled. “Then…Shirley came on and absolutely electrified me and everybody else in the audience. By the final curtain, we were all on our feet, yelling for her to come out again and again.”