In 1990, Shirley MacLaine took away Debbie Reynolds’ chance to play herself. It couldn’t have been easy for the veteran star of Singing under the rain. His daughter, Carrie Fisher, had published three years earlier her delicious Postcards from the edge, an autofiction book in which the actress cheekily detailed her time at a detoxification center and her self-esteem problems. Fisher exposed the wounds of fame, family and addiction with refreshing humor. The book had an unexpected impact as a portrait of a badly injured puppy from old Hollywood and director Mike Nichols decided to bring it to the screen. The film version, for which Janet Leigh and her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis were nominated, featured Meryl Streep as Fischer and MacLaine as her mother. In the book, Doris Mann (translated by Reynolds) did not have as much prominence, but Nichols, who during the filming of Guns of a Woman experienced Melanie Griffith’s problems with drugs and the shadow of her mother, Tippi Hedren, wanted to focus the film in the mother-child relationship. Carrie Fisher wrote the script and the Apartment actress, who just turned 90, landed one of the great roles of her career.
Always under the mask of her false eyelashes, her blush and her red wig, the sad and funny Doris is a portrait as tough as it is tender of an old Hollywood glory faced with life away from the stage and her cocaine-addicted daughter. In one of her most famous sequences, Doris prepares a welcome party for her daughter after her visit to a clinic, which becomes an excuse for her mother to show off. Wearing a red lamé suit, MacLaine performs I’m Still Here, Stephen Sondheim song for the musical Follies and emotional anthem about another terrible addiction, addiction to the spotlight. Nichols asked Sondheim to adapt the lyrics, and MacLaine nailed one of his most brilliant sequences. Never has a crossing of legs been loaded with so much melancholy. There is a lot of wisdom in MacLaine’s character in this movie that irritated Lana Turner by putting her in the bag of Joan Crawford-type bad mothers. But Doris is not a bad mother, she is just an acting mother and, as her daughter reproaches her, she cannot help being the way she is: “I don’t know how you do it, Mom, but we ended up talking about your death and not my rehabilitation.”
