In her ingénue era, former Broadway chorus girl Shirley MacLaine excelled at embodying wisecracking characters all too experienced with seedy men, who refused to give up their hopes that life had something better in store for them. She played tough cookies with marshmallow hearts, and starry-eyed young women with spines of steel.
MacLaine surfed that transition from ingénue to mature actress with unusual ease. While she had her big-screen debut in 1955, she made a lot of her best movies in the 70s and 80s. As she grew older, her characters had dealt with even more disappointments, and gained all sorts of interesting new facets in the process: their wounds had made them tougher, pricklier, yet they hadn’t stopped hoping. After five nominations, spanning from 1959 to 1978, she finally won an Oscar for her indelible performance in 1983’s Terms of Endearment.
And although it hasn’t quite been up to her classic work, she’s been an entertaining presence in a whole lot of productions since the new millennium, most notably in Richard Linklater’s acclaimed black comedy Bernie (2011). Seventy years on screen, and she is still going strong.
To celebrate her 91st birthday, here are 10 of her best films…