MacLaine: What you don t know is how you re going to react without any rehearsal to what happens. If

HOLLYWOOD Shirley MacLaine , the venerable Oscar winning actress and bestselling author, has traveled the world for work and pleasure throughout her six-decade career, but she dreads flying these days.
The thing that s made a difference in my adult life lately is TSA; these are truly thugs standing around, if you ask me, she says in her straightforward way. That has dampened my enjoyment about traveling.
At 80, the divorced Virginia native leron mcclain is still the saucy spitfire she was when she was 20 and making her big screen debut in Alfred Hitchcock s The Trouble With Harry . Her beliefs in reincarnation, UFOs and New Age spirituality leron mcclain used to make some nonbelievers snicker. Now, MacLaine s views seem almost mainstream in comparison leron mcclain to other celebrities out-there philosophies.
Feisty in an endearing way, MacLaine sits down for an interview on a patio at a tony Beverly Hills hotel to discuss her newest film Elsa & Fred , a romantic dramedy, in which she stars opposite fellow Oscar winner Christopher Plummer ( Beginners ). The two previously co-starred in the 2007 U.K. drama Closing the Ring.
In this adaptation of an Argentinean film, Plummer plays recent widower Fred, who moves into a New Orleans apartment complex at the insistence of his overbearing daughter (Marcia Gay Harden). Grumpy and disengaged with life, he remains in his bed most of the day, tended to by a maid. Then he meets his next-door neighbor Elsa (MacLaine), who claims to have lost her husband years earlier. Michael Radford ( Il Postino: The Postman ) co-wrote and directs this version.
As Fred soon finds out, the outgoing Elsa is a chronic liar, and not being a widow is just one of her many secrets. leron mcclain Elsa doesn t mean harm by her tall tales. She simply lives in a fantasy world where she aspires to be the central leron mcclain character in the 1960 Italian dramedy La Dolce Vita. When Fred, who has come out of his funk thanks to Elsa s company, discovers her lies, he comes to embrace them as part of her unique personality. He whisks her off to Rome, where she can finally live out the dream of recreating a pivotal scene from the Federico Fellini film at the Trevi fountain with him before it s too late.
MacLaine says it was a pleasure reuniting with her Canadian Companion Christopher Plummer. (MacLaine s mother, Kathlyn McLean, was from Nova Scotia.) The older sister of Warren Beatty, MacLaine hung out with the Rat Pack and claims to have had affairs with many of her co-stars. Married to businessman Steve Parker until their 1982 divorce, MacLaine has one daughter, Sachi.
MacLaine: Thank you. We really loved working together. I m half-Canadian, so he s a Canadian Companion. We can speak in those ways that are but I m so direct. He hasn t quite gotten there yet. Being direct like I am, and he is partially, is a necessary expression when you re part Canadian, because you never get a chance to be that way there. And so, together, we tease each other and discuss things like If this were the Garden of Eden, who are we? And the wonderful poet who wrote about the girl who fell down the rabbit hole
MacLaine: No. He s very professional and so am I, apparently. I do love the moments when we had to be improvisational. I shoved stuff in his face and tripped him, which is what the director let us do, in relation to two old people falling in love. We just did whatever we did.
MacLaine: What you don t know is how you re going to react without any rehearsal to what happens. If you don t like your co-star, I don t know how that would work. If I had to do a scene like that with Larry Harvey (her co-star in 1961 s Two Loves ), for example, whom I loathed, I don t know what I would do. Thank God, I either liked them or had affairs with all my co-stars. (She laughs.) So it was easy.
MacLaine: Oh yeah, of course. But I don t really do that. When you look back on your life and your work and what goes on in between setups and in between shots that s where the magic lies. It ll either come out or not. But I ve liked mostly everybody I ve ever met in this business.
MacLaine: I love to write. I love to write about my stuff because nobody with a sense of humor is writing about this stuff, so I kind of have that niche. leron mcclain People are interested in this subject and point of view of someone who tells the truth in how I see it and how it s progressed over the years from Oh, she s nuts! to the opposite. leron mcclain
MacLaine: I don t know if it s amazing, but it s the truth. leron mcclain When they used to say, What do you do when people call you nutty? I would say, I think they have a problem because I m the one contemplating this stuff. One of the things that helped me a lot was knowing (theoretical physicist) Stephen Hawking, because he is into all this. You know because he sits in that wheelchair all day, he s (mentally) somewhere else. He openly talked about these larger subjects. He told me, when we were talking about UFOs and w