Object Details
- Exhibition Label
- Born Richmond, Virginia
- Known for such Oscar-winning films as Terms of Endearment as well as her current portrayal as Cora Crawley’s American mother in Downton Abbey, Shirley MacLaine actually began her versatile career as a dancer on stage and screen. She became a Broadway star at twenty when she replaced leading dancer Carol Haney in the 1954 Broadway hit The Pajama Game. Her magnetic personality soon attracted Hollywood, where her gamine quality made her a star in such films as Some Came Running, The Apartment, and Irma La Douce.
- In this backstage photograph, MacLaine is captured on the set for the movie version of Cole Porter’s Can-Can, a film that critics acknowledge as her most effervescent dance performance. Her other dance films include The Turning Point with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, whose score contributed her signature song, “If My Friends Could See Me Now.”
- Data Source
- National Portrait Gallery
- Artist
- Bob Willoughby, 30 Jun 1927 - 18 Dec 2009
- Sitter
- Shirley MacLaine, born 24 Apr 1934
- Date
- 1959 (printed Feb 13, 1981)
- Credit Line
- National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bob Willoughby
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions
- Image: 34.1 × 24 cm (13 7/16 × 9 7/16")
- Sheet: 40.7 × 30.3 cm (16 × 11 15/16")
- Mat: 71.1 × 55.9 cm (28 × 22")
- Type
- Photograph
