Shirley MacLaine danced a whole ballet on a broken ankle before calling an ambulance
Cast as the fairy godmother in Cinderella, young Shirley MacLaine snapped her ankle while warming up backstage. She laced her pointe shoes tighter, danced the entire performance, and only then asked for an ambulance. That stubbornness carried her from a Broadway understudy's lucky break to an Oscar, six Golden Globes and a career lasting over 70 years.
Born Shirley MacLean Beaty in Richmond, Virginia, in 1934 and named after the child star Shirley Temple, she is the older sister of filmmaker Warren Beatty. Weak ankles that made her topple over as a toddler led her mother to enrol her in ballet at three. She usually danced the boys' parts because she was the tallest girl, and eventually abandoned classical ballet, feeling her height and feet were wrong for it. She also held the home run record on a boys' baseball team, earning the nickname Powerhouse.
Her break came straight out of a musical cliche. As understudy to Carol Haney in The Pajama Game, she went on when Haney hurt her ankle in May 1954. With Haney still out months later, Jerry Lewis caught a matinee and brought producer Hal Wallis to that evening's show, and Wallis signed her to Paramount. Her screen debut, Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry in 1955, won her a Golden Globe as new star of the year.
Billy Wilder's The Apartment in 1960, in which she played an elevator operator opposite Jack Lemmon, brought a second Oscar nomination; heavily favoured, she lost to Elizabeth Taylor, though she took the Volpi Cup and a BAFTA. She became an honorary member of the Rat Pack alongside Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. In 1963 she walked into the offices of The Hollywood Reporter and punched columnist Mike Connolly over what he had written about her contract fight with Wallis, whom she later sued successfully.
She paused acting in 1972 to campaign for George McGovern and turned down the mother's role in The Exorcist. Her Best Actress Oscar finally came for Terms of Endearment in 1983, the year her best-selling memoir Out on a Limb, about spirituality and reincarnation, appeared. The AFI Life Achievement Award followed in 2012.
Source: Shirley MacLaine
