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Hope Lange, 24 (married, two children), is a Hollywood rarity, a fine actress who wears sincerity like a cameo. A good girl in Bus Stop, raped, kicked and beaten in Peyton Place, a glossy career girl in The Best of Everything, she can project whatever is asked for with the professional competence of an actress who started on the stage when she was twelve (in Sidney Kingsley's The Patriots). "A lot of people who are stars never have time to work out what they are doing," says she. "Acting is important to me, and I believe it is important to the world."
First Laugh. Hollywood's list includes actresses as impressive as Shirley Mac-Laine, dancers as skilled, singers as competent. If they thought it mattered, any of them could put on a passable imitation of her scorn for that Hollywood staple, the false front. Still, none of the new girls in town are up to MacLaine. Why?
The answer lies somewhere in the uncommon blend of luck, looks, talent, determination and good salt sweat that is the essence of Shirley's art. She has watched for the breaks and made them work for her ever since her first appearance onstage. It was at a dancing-school recital, and she was only four. "I had on a little green costume and looked like a fool four-leaf clover. I tripped on the curtain and fell down. That's when I got my first laugh. I liked it. I damn near fell down again—on purpose—but I knew my teacher would have killed me."
Such early dancing-school training suggests that Shirley was shoved toward the stage by ambitious parents. Not so. Her mother, Canadian-born Kathryn MacLean Beaty, was a dabbler in amateur theatricals, and her father, Ira O. Beaty, a scholarly Virginian, was a part-time musician, but the dancing lessons had a practical explanation: Shirley had weak ankles.
"I couldn't control them," says Shirley. "I walked like a duck, so Mother sent me to ballet school to strengthen them. I loved the freedom of expression in movement. From the time I was three, I kept telling Mother, 'I want to be a little dancing gal.' " When Shirley was eleven, her parents moved from Richmond, where she was born, to Arlington. A good teacher in Washington, Julia Mildred Harper, became the reason "I don't have muscles in my legs like most dancers. If you do a little jump, your automatic reaction is to put your heels up. If you have a teacher yelling every minute, 'No, get your heels down,' the muscles in your calves stay long and supple." The north half of Shirley's body, she admits, "is not exactly Marilynish. In the movies and on TV, they always try to make me look bigger. But if I augment myself up there, people won't notice my legs, and my legs are supposed to be very nice."