By Tiffany N. Ramsey

Shirley MacLaine, 76, recently appeared on Oprah and offered a revealing and at times shocking look into her life. MacLaine, who is promoting her twelfth book, I'm Over All That And Other Confessions, was incredibly candid and spoke on a variety of topics that included: love, sex, and why she doesn’t attend funerals.

MacLaine’s Hollywood career has spanned five decades and has given her the opportunity to play a multitude of interesting, comedic, complex, and award winning roles. Some of my favorites include; Terms of Endearment (1983) in which MacLaine played loving mother Aurora Greenway, and later won an Oscar for, the delightfully grumpy Weezer, in Steel Magnolias (1989), Doris Mann, the self absorbed screen star in competition with her daughter (Meryl Streep) in Postcards from the Edge (1990). In addition to film, MacLaine has been very successful as an author. Her previous books have sold more than 20 million copies and often chronicle her beliefs on spirituality and UFO’s.

While Shirley is often criticized for her outspoken, New Age thinking, she has Oprah Winfrey in her corner. "She's been criticized a lot, but I think she has been so misunderstood," Oprah says. "[She is] one of my greatest teachers."

Class was definitely in session on Oprah’s couch. Among her many confessions, Shirley admitted that while she wasn’t into “sexcapades,” she did try it once. "I had three people in one day. It was on a political campaign, where everybody was doing the same thing," she said, laughing. "I just didn't want to be left out." MacLaine, who was married for 30 years before divorcing, stated that she and her husband, businessman Steve Parker, had an open relationship and both were allowed to have affairs. MacLaine said, she has had "an awful lot of lovers.”

MacLaine also told Winfrey that she often fell for the leading men she worked with, although she wasn't attracted to Jack Lemmon, her costar in The Apartment, because he was too nice, or Jack Nicholson, whom she starred opposite in Terms of Endearment, because he was too dangerous. She did however name actor Robert Mitchum and French movie star Yves Montand as men that she had fallen for. These days however, MacLaine would rather live with her dog, Terry. "I'd rather have a good, funny, loyal dog than a man," she wrote in her book.

Another interesting point MacLaine touched on, was that of reincarnation. Shirley believes the soul is everlasting, and says she does not attend funerals—in her belief system, no one ever dies. "Nobody's dead, so why am I going to a funeral?" she says. MacLaine believes that instead of dying, people shed their bodies and literally pass on. "[You] go to another level of understanding until you decide to come back to the schoolroom again—Earth," she says. "It could be that you decide to reincarnate on another planet. That's why we're so interested in star nations and extraterrestrials and so forth, because we probably had experiences there and it's in our memory system."

MacLaine certainly isn’t afraid to give us something to think or talk about and I am defiantly intrigued by her and will be putting this book on my reading list for the summer. Perhaps an editorial review of her latest effort says it best, “An unabashed seeker of truth and unrepentant free spirit, Shirley looks squarely at a world that can irritate, confuse, and provoke her, but that can also delight her with its beauty, humor, and future promise. Reading I’m Over All That will make you feel you have been reunited with an old friend who tells it like it is but never takes herself too seriously. Shirley MacLaine may be over all that, but this irresistible book ensures that we will never get over her.” 

PHOTO SOURCE: passportmagazine.com, borders.com, oprah.com

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