Four years after the release of her Oscar-winning ”Terms of
Endearment,” actress, dancer, author and New Age spokeswoman Shirley MacLaine is back in front of the movie cameras. And despite the chill on the Twickenham soundstage (where MacLaine once filmed ”The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom” and ”The Yellow Rolls Royce”) and the mechanical difficulty of synchronizing her silent piano playing with a pre-recorded track blaring through earplugs, MacLaine is enjoying filming ”Madame Sousatzka” (which is scheduled to open in Chicago Friday).
On this particular Friday, MacLaine, who is 53, is playing Sousatzka at 18, pounding the ivories to please her demanding mother (Carol Gillies). Yesterday, she was flamboyantly talented piano teacher Madame Sousatzka at age 60, all dimples, ringlets, bangles and shawls, fighting with a mother (Indian star Shabana Azmi) for possession of her handsome musical-prodigy son
(newcomer Navin Chowdhry).
Over quiche and salad in her cozy dressing room, she admits that the atmosphere on the set-with director John Schlesinger and her co-stars, who also include Peggy Ashcroft and Twiggy-has been far more harmonious than the unhappy ”Terms” shoot. This time, MacLaine, who has a well-publicized new career as the official spokeswoman for the new `80s spiritualism, is putting her acquired metaphysical knowledge to use in her acting. For insurance, MacLaine supplied the cast and crew with their own crystals.
”The days they forget them,” she says, smiling, ”things go wrong.”
The movie is based on Bernice Rubens` 1961 novel about a piano teacher`s struggle for the soul of a young prodigy. Screenwriters Schlesinger and Oscar- winner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writing her first screenplay separate from Merchant-Ivory) performed only a slight rewrite to accommodate MacLaine. They simply turned Sousatzka into a Russian-American who had lived in London for 30 years.
”The story is symbolic,” says MacLaine. ”It`s about these people who live in a little rooming house. It`s about the inevitability of things being sold, change vs. tradition, artistry vs. commerciality, freedom of expression vs. repression. John says I`m putting him through his optimistic period because we changed the last scene: instead of slamming the door in the boy`s face, she really lets him go with her blessing.”
Between sips of Diet Coke, MacLaine enthusiastically explains how she created Madame Sousatzka: ”On `Terms,` I hadn`t enough faith in the technique. Now I`m really beginning to work these principles. Thoughts and ideas precede the creation of everything in our lives. When you`re working in an artistic way, creative concepts become objectively real. So when we sit and create Madame Sousatzka`s makeup and clothes and way of walking and being-in between the lines already created by the authors of the screenplay-we are developing and evolving more reality from thoughts and ideas.
”It`s the reality of the unseen, of magic,” says MacLaine. ”When we were finished and all of our ideas became one agreed-upon collective concept, Sousatzka was born! Then it was up to me to get out of her way and let her play herself through me, this instrument called Shirley-and that`s no different from channeling.”
MacLaine believes that, at some time, she must have lived in Russia.
”And somewhere I`ve had the experience of being this manipulative, outrageous lady.”
MacLaine remembers teachers of her own-in her case, ballet teachers.
”Everyone has had a teacher who was like Sousatzka-kind of manipulative, proprietary, outrageously demanding, arrogant and imperious and a fool, and, at the same time, doing it all for your own artistic development-she thinks.
I had one in the sixth grade, Miss Masselitti, who was like (Sousatzka). She was an Italian fascist. Sousatzka is a Russian-American fascist. All fascists-people who hurt other people-feel very bad about themselves, from Charlie Manson to Hitler. And Sousatzka`s very frightened and vulnerable.
”When this kid,” MacLaine continues, referring to the prized Sousatzka pupil played by Chowdhry, ”grows up and wants to move on to another teacher, she gets so threatened he`s going to leave her that she becomes cruel. Such is the lack of self-esteem.
”I love to play contradictions,” she adds. ”The older I get, the more I realize that we`re all a bundle of contradictions.”
MacLaine insists that all she had to do to master Sousatzka`s intricate piano fingering was to let Sousatzka take over. (She did, however, spend many hours rehearsing with Royal College professor Yonti Solomon.)
”Maybe it`s the gods of these characters speaking through me. The only way I can describe it is: I go into this space and just get out of the way. I don`t play the piano. But she does. I just let Sousatzka play herself. When a scene goes wrong it`s because I`m in there. You know when you do something wonderful, absolutely inspired, is when you let it happen, let it come through. We spend so much time letting our intelligence make things difficult.”
MacLaine points to a table strewn with stills of herself as Sousatzka.
”That`s not me over there. These 15 pounds are not mine, they`re hers-although I had fun gaining them. The rubber on her face is helped by my own. It`s so real, it looks like I`m the one who`s aging-and to a certain extent I am-but it`s Sousatzka who`s feeling much older than I do.”
MacLaine admits that she had to overcome some vanity to achieve the dowdy Sousatzka. She didn`t want publicity photos of Sousatzka to appear in newspapers without an accompanying shot of herself looking a decade younger.
”The critics will look at this and say, `Oh my God, is that what metaphysics has done to Shirley!` ”
When Schlesinger first met with MacLaine in New York he had his doubts that she could pull off Sousatzka-she looked too young. ”How did you do it in `Terms`?” he asked her. ”It was a tough shoot,” she replied. But she persuaded him.
”The transformation is amazing,” says Schlesinger.
It`s unusual for an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress to commit to such a small-scale British production lacking major-studio involvement. ”It never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that we`d get Shirley,” admits producer Robin Dalton, who arranged distribution through Cineplex-Odeon. ”It was a big surprise for all of us. Now we can`t think of anyone else playing the part. She is Sousatzka.”
Having won her Oscar, MacLaine no longer has anything to prove. ”Now when I commit three to four months to do something, I`m more in love with the time. I don`t care if the movie makes money or if the critics love it.”
MacLaine hasn`t been avoiding movies in the last four years. She just hasn`t found any scripts she wanted to do. She turned down Cannon`s ”Shy People,” among other things, she says. ”When I read `Madame Sousatzka,` I immediately had the same feelings I had when I read `Terms,` which I knew everyone had turned down not once but twice: Hollywood won`t understand this, so it`s going to work. This is the first time I`ve worked since `Terms` and it`s because I hadn`t got that tingle again.”
Despite all of her highflying rhetoric, MacLaine actually seeks out movie roles that are grounded in reality.
”I`m not all that interested in playing metaphysical or spiritual subjects on-screen,” she says. ”So far, I haven`t seen that work. They work in phantasmagorical terms with Lucas and Spielberg, but when it becomes real. . . .
”I discussed past life recall with five directors, but it`s very difficult to dramatize. It could look like a B movie.”
MacLaine believes that in the end, audiences respond to pictures with heart.
”That`s why I end up doing pictures about human beings who are struggling to be understood. The masculine intelligence of the brain should be balanced with the feminine intelligence of the heart. I`ve never had any trouble with my left-brain intelligence, I`ve always been very assertive in that respect. I`ve needed to balance and trust the feminine part of me, the intuitive intelligence of the heart. That was not easy to do in Hollywood. It was thought of as naive and ultimately you wouldn`t survive.”
Perhaps this helps explain MacLaine`s attraction to Louise Brooks, the rambunctious actress who left Hollywood in the `30s and wrote scathingly, late in life, about her experiences there. After MacLaine finishes editing a manual of spiritual techniques and breaks ground for her first spiritual center in Baca, Colo. (to be built with the proceeds from her seminars), she hopes to make her next film, in which she`ll play Brooks, from age 30 straight through to 74. The story is partly based on Kathleen Tynan`s biography of her husband, critic Kenneth Tynan, who profiled the septuagenarian Brooks for The New Yorker.
”We`ll start when Ken finds her in a hotel in Rochester, N.Y.,”
MacLaine says, grinning. ”They both fell in love for the first time. We`ll get all the old stuff done, and then I`ll go have a face lift and we`ll do Louise Brooks at 30. I look just like her in some shots in `Gambit.` ”
