Shirley MacLaine The Apartment (1960)

Shirley MacLaine (b. 1934) played Fran Kubelik in The Apartment — the elevator operator with the cracked compact, the lover of J.D. Sheldrake, and the woman who delivers the film's last line. The performance earned her the second of her six Best Actress nominations and is widely considered one of the great female performances of the 1960s. Her later collaboration with Wilder on Irma la Douce (1963) was the only film to follow.

Before The Apartment

MacLaine was born Shirley MacLean Beaty in Richmond, Virginia, the older sister of Warren Beatty. She was discovered in 1954 in the Broadway musical The Pajama Game, where she went on for the lead Carol Haney mid-run; producer Hal Wallis signed her to a Paramount contract. Her early films were comedies and Hitchcock — The Trouble with Harry (1955), Frank Capra's Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958, her first Best Actress nomination), and Ask Any Girl (1959).

By 1959 she had a public persona: ingenue, Rat Pack mascot (she was friendly with Sinatra, Martin, and Davis), and one of the more interesting young leading women in Hollywood. She was 25 when production on The Apartment began.

Wilder cast her on faith

Shirley MacLaine signed onto the picture without seeing a finished script — about forty pages and Wilder's verbal sketch were all she had. She has said in multiple interviews that she trusted Wilder absolutely.

"Billy didn't give me the whole script. He told me about my character and a little bit about how it would unfold, but mostly he just said, 'Trust me.' And I did." — Shirley MacLaine, Vanity Fair (2015)

The trust was structural for the performance. Fran is a character who does not know what is going to happen to her — she walks into Christmas Eve thinking she will receive a divorce promise and walks out with a stomach pump — and the not-knowing is part of what MacLaine had to play.

What she brought to the role

The Fran of The Apartment is a character who could easily be played as a victim or as a saint. MacLaine plays her as neither. Fran is funny, sharp-tongued, self-aware about the affair, and entirely capable of articulating exactly what Sheldrake is doing to her — and she stays anyway. The performance lives in the gap between her clear-sightedness and her inability to leave.

"MacLaine plays Fran as a woman who knows everything about the situation she's in and stays anyway. The performance is the architecture of how that's possible." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2001)

The cracked-compact scene is the performance in miniature. Fran picks up the broken mirror, looks at her own fractured reflection, and says she likes it that way — it makes her look the way she feels. The line is comedy by structure (a self-aware joke) and tragedy by content (she has just realized her lover is using a junior employee's apartment). MacLaine plays both registers in the same shot.

The gin rummy and the closing line

The famous gin rummy game — which becomes the closing image of the film — emerged partly from MacLaine's behavior on set. She played cards with crew members between setups, and Wilder wrote the gin game into the recovery sequences after watching her shuffle. The closing exchange — Lemmon's "I absolutely adore you, Miss Kubelik," her "Shut up and deal" — was MacLaine's moment to refuse the romantic-comedy convention. See "Shut up and deal" (the closing line).

"'Shut up and deal' is the line I'm most proud of having said in any movie. It's not a love declaration — it's better than that. It's two adults agreeing to keep going, together, without making it sound prettier than it is." — Shirley MacLaine, The Hollywood Reporter (2018)

Irma la Douce: the Wilder follow-up

MacLaine and Wilder reunited three years later for Irma la Douce (1963), a Parisian sex comedy in which she played the title role — a streetwalker — opposite Jack Lemmon as a gendarme who falls for her. The film was a commercial success but a critical step down. The role was less interior than Fran, the structure was less precise, and the ending was less honest. MacLaine was nominated for a third Golden Globe but the third Wilder collaboration the partnership seemed to promise never materialized.

"Irma la Douce was Billy at his most commercial. The Apartment was Billy at his best. I'm glad I got to do both, but I knew the difference." — Shirley MacLaine, Vanity Fair (2015)

After Wilder

MacLaine's career has now spanned more than seven decades. The Best Actress nominations came for Some Came Running (1958), The Apartment (1960), Irma la Douce (1963), The Turning Point (1977), and Terms of Endearment (1983, the win). She has also been a successful nightclub performer, dancer, and author of nine memoirs and several books on metaphysics and spirituality.

The performances most often discussed alongside Fran Kubelik are The Children's Hour (1961), Sweet Charity (1969), Being There (1979), Terms of Endearment (1983), and Postcards from the Edge (1990). The through-line is the woman who is sharper than her circumstances and stays anyway.

Awards and legacy

MacLaine has received six Best Actress Oscar nominations and one win, the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2013, and the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1998. The American Film Institute placed her at #46 on its 100 Years . . . 100 Stars list in 1999. (afi.com)