Happy 90th birthday, Shirley MacLaine: her 20 best films - ranked!
Kooky kid sister, romantic lead, comic turn, cantankerous old dame … we pick out her greatest roles
An early Shirley in this epic Technicolor comedy-adventure based on Jules Verne, overstuffed with superstar cameos and produced by the impresario Mike Todd. David Niven sauntered through the role of the globe-circling gent Phileas Fogg and 22-year-old MacLaine was cast in the way Hollywood sometimes saw her in those days … as someone whose feline, gamine looks had something exotic and Asiatic about them. She was the Indian Princess Aouda, widowed after a loveless arranged marriage but rescued from the funeral pyre by the bold Fogg, whom she then joins on his travels for a while. A sweet and likable comic turn.There can’t be a much more thankless task for any young female star in 50s Hollywood than playing the third wheel in a movie starring Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. But MacLaine gamely carried it off and this was a singing role - strangely, there aren’t that many musicals in her credit list. She plays Bessie, a talented comic-cook artist living next door to a couple of goofy guys: Martin is the smooth ladies-man Rick and Lewis is his zany roommate, Eugene, frantically obsessed with the kind of raunchy comics she’s creating. It was rather a racy film in some ways, but it also showcases another side to MacLaine that producers kept emphasising, however worldly the role: the kooky kid sister image, inspiring protective gallantry