To play Bewitched diva, MacLaine just acted naturally

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This article was published 23/06/2005 (7783 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOS ANGELES — Shirley MacLaine plays a diva actress in the movie Bewitched. And she admits the challenge of playing a demanding, manipulating, upstaging thespian doesn’t veer too far from her own sense of her place in the entertainment world.

“The older I get, the more I think I deserve to act just like that,” she says.

Certainly, the diva thing syncs nicely with the last time I saw her.

In July of 2002, MacLaine was wrapping up her work on the locally shot TV movie Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay on location in front of a Wilkes Avenue church.

The set was tense that day. As the seconds ticked towards MacLaine’s scheduled afternoon flight out of Winnipeg, director Ed Gernon wanted to keep her on the set for a few more takes in his re-creation of a showdown between MacLaine’s character, cosmetics maven Mary Kay, and her bitter rival Jinger Heath, played by Parker Posey.

A seasoned actress for 51 of her 71 years, MacLaine knows how to make an entrance and is even more impressive demonstrating how to make an exit.

When she had had enough, she simply whipped off her Mary Kay wig and strode off the set with a director’s emissary on her heels, begging fruitlessly for just a few more minutes, to no avail.

Posey memorably registered mock scandal at the spectacle, raising her eyebrows and uttering: “Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O’s.”

MacLaine could be seen minutes later in the back of a limo getting a police escort to the airport, befitting her stature as an entertainment icon.

* * *

Call it a sense of entitlement that comes naturally with a half-century in showbiz, beginning with a classic Broadway success story: When the star of The Pajama Game fractured her ankle, understudy MacLaine went on and was promptly discovered by contract-wielding producer Hal Wallis.

MacLaine went on to a glorious, sustained career encompassing showbiz greats such as Hitchcock (The Trouble With Harry was her debut film), the Rat Pack (she both starred and toured with Sinatra) … and a gold statue named Oscar. When she got the best-actress nod for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment, Shirley unabashedly opined: “I deserve this.”

Bewitched co-star/co-redhead Nicole Kidman would agree.

“There’s a woman who has given some of the greatest comedic-dramatic performances,” Kidman says. “She’s made us laugh and cry at the same time and her balance of that is one of the hardest things to do.

“If you look at Terms of Endearment, she made Jack (Nicholson) better,” Kidman says. “Which is pretty good.”

But of course, MacLaine’s achievements have, to an extent, been eclipsed by her reputation as a metaphysical adventuress. Her claims to past lives and extra-terrestrial encounters have been documented in her many books, which has resulted in a reputation for eccentricity. (Even fellow Ratpacker Dean Martin was heard to observe of MacLaine: “I love her, but her oars aren’t touching the water these days.”)

MacLaine freely lampoons herself in that respect. On the subject of playing both Bewitched‘s witchy mother-in-law Endora and the actress who revives her, MacLaine is asked if she ever met the late Agnes Moorehead, who portrayed Endora in the 1962-72 series.

“I talked to her last night. She’s doing very well,” she quips.

No fan of the original series, MacLaine says she was attracted to the movie simply because, “I wanted to play a witch.

“That’s the idea, since everyone else thinks I’m one,” she says. “I wanted to play it with good writing.”

MacLaine doesn’t suggest the witchcraft in the movie is realistic, exactly, but she does enjoy the fact that the film’s fantasy can open minds to a more adventurous notion of reality.

“I love the idea … of doing something that utilizes magic powers, which I think are possible in real life,” she says, adding that her own claims to supernatural experience are more acceptable than ever.

“The things I was writing about and talking about 20 or 25 years ago are now basically mainstream, wouldn’t you say?”

And as MacLaine’s time wraps up and a publicist tells her it’s time to move on, she resists as firmly as she resisted her director’s entreaties to stay three years back.

“Hold on a minute,” MacLaine says. “I’ll go when I want to.”

Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O’s.

Bewitched opens tomorrow.