Born in Richmond, Virginia, MacLaine made her acting debut as a teenager with minor roles in the Broadway musicals Me and Juliet and The Pajama Game.

She rose to prominence with starring roles in Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Some Came Running (1958), Ask Any Girl (1959), The Apartment (1960), The Children's Hour (1961), Irma la Douce (1963), and Sweet Charity (1969).

Her other prominent films include The Turning Point (1977), Being There (1979), Madame Sousatzka (1988), Steel Magnolias (1989), Postcards from the Edge (1990), In Her Shoes (2005), Bernie (2011), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), Elsa & Fred (2014), and Noelle (2019).

Ultimately MacLaine decided against making a career of professional ballet because she had grown too tall and felt unable to perfect her technique.

The summer before her senior year of high school in Arlington, Virginia, MacLaine went to New York City to try acting and had minor success in the chorus of a production of Oklahoma!

[14] A few months later, with Haney still injured, Jerry Lewis saw a matinee and urged film producer Hal B. Wallis to attend the evening performance with him, hoping to cast her in Artists and Models.

She played Ginny Moorehead, who falls in love with Frank Sinatra's character, Dave, in Vincente Minelli's adaptation of James Jones’ novel Some Came Running, in the 1958 film of the same name.

It received ten Academy Award nominations, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction (Black and White) and Best Film Editing.

Charlize Theron, speaking at the 89th Academy Awards, praised MacLaine's performance as "raw, real, and funny", and as making "this black and white movie feel like it's in color".

She devoted some pages to a 1963 incident in which she had marched into the Los Angeles office of The Hollywood Reporter and punched columnist Mike Connolly in the mouth.

[17] She was angered by what he had said in his column about her ongoing contractual dispute with producer Hal Wallis, who had introduced her to the movie industry in 1954 and whom she eventually sued successfully for violating the terms of their contract.

In the mid-1960s, Twentieth Century-Fox offered her a salary of $750,000 on a "pay or play" basis to appear in a movie adaptation of the musical Bloomer Girl, a fee equivalent to the paydays enjoyed by top box office stars of the time.

[20] MacLaine next starred in seven roles as seven different women in Vittorio DeSica's episodic film Woman Times Seven (1967), a collection of seven stories of love and adultery set against a Paris backdrop.

In 1969, MacLaine starred in the film version of the musical Sweet Charity, directed by Bob Fosse, and based on the script for Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria which was released a decade earlier.

[citation needed] MacLaine was top-billed in Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), in a role written for Elizabeth Taylor, who chose not to appear in the movie.

The Western film was a hit, primarily due to her co-star Clint Eastwood, one of the top box office stars in the world at that time.

In 1980, MacLaine starred in two other films about adultery, A Change of Seasons alongside Anthony Hopkins and Bo Derek, and Loving Couples with James Coburn and Susan Sarandon.

Neither film was a success, with Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times calling Loving Couples "a dumb remake of a very old idea that has been done so much better so many times before, that this version is wretchedly unnecessary ... the whole project smells like high-gloss sitcom.

Vincent Canby wrote in his The New York Times review that the film "exhibits no sense of humor and no appreciation for the ridiculous ... the screenplay [is] often dreadful ... the only appealing performance is Miss MacLaine's, and she's too good to be true.

In 1989, she released her VHS, Shirley MacLaine's Inner Workout: A Program for Relaxation and Stress Reduction through Meditation, a companion to her 1989 book, Going Within: A Guide for Inner Transformation.

[citation needed] MacLaine continued to act in films such as Used People (1992), with Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates; Guarding Tess (1994), with Nicolas Cage; Mrs. Winterbourne (1996), with Ricki Lake and Brendan Fraser; The Evening Star (1996); Rumor Has It...(2005) with Kevin Costner and Jennifer Aniston; In Her Shoes (also 2005), with Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette; and Closing the Ring (2007), directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Christopher Plummer.

In 2011, MacLaine starred in Richard Linklater's dark comedy film Bernie alongside Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey.

[citation needed] MacLaine has also appeared in numerous television projects, including a 1987 miniseries based upon her bestselling autobiography, Out on a Limb.

[39] MacLaine also had long-running affairs with Lord Mountbatten, whom she met in the 1960s, and Australian politician and two-time Liberal leader Andrew Peacock.

[40][41] MacLaine has also gotten into feuds with such co-stars as Anthony Hopkins (A Change of Seasons), who said that "she was the most obnoxious actress I have ever worked with", and Debra Winger (Terms of Endearment).

[42][43][44][45] MacLaine claimed that in a previous life in Atlantis she was the brother of a 35,000-year-old spirit named Ramtha, channeled by mystic teacher and author J.

In Albert Brooks's romantic comedy Defending Your Life (1991), the recently deceased lead characters, played by Brooks and Meryl Streep, are astonished to find MacLaine introducing their past lives in the "Past Lives Pavilion"; in Postcards from the Edge (1990), MacLaine sings a version of "I'm Still Here", with lyrics customized for her by composer Stephen Sondheim (for example, one line in the lyrics was changed to "I'm feeling transcendental – am I here?

[50] On an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in April 2011, MacLaine stated that she and her neighbor had observed numerous UFOs at her New Mexico ranch for extended periods of time.

[51] Along with her brother Warren Beatty, MacLaine used her celebrity status in instrumental roles as a fundraiser and organizer for George McGovern's campaign for president in 1972.

[58] One of its claims was that, when Sachi was in her 20s, her mother told her she believed that Steve Parker was a clone of her real father, an astronaut named Paul then traveling in the Pleiades.