Dance While You Can

At the age of fifty-seven, after nearly four decades in Hollywood, Academy-Award-winning actress and entertainer Shirley MacLaine is still moving us to laughter and tears in major film roles, still high-kicking on stage in live performances - and still searching for the truth within herself. In this, her most intimate memoir yet, she examines with courage and candor her feelings about aging, relationships, work, her parents, her daughter, and her own future as an artist and as a woman. "There was a hidden agenda in our family. Warren and I were not only driven to fulfill our parents' unrealized dreams but, in the process, to prove Mother correct in her aspirations for us in spite of our father's fears and his harshly critical attitude toward our efforts...We had to do it. We had to be there. We couldn't disappoint her, or the audience, or ourselves...In other words, there was no way Warren and I wouldn't become stars." In Dance While You Can, Shirley examines the powerful familial forces that have shaped her life, legacies of a strong-willed mother whose own longing to be acknowledged propelled Shirley and her brother, Warren Beatty, to success, and of a father whose fear of failure inspired her always to prepare for the worst. She reflects on her relationship with her daughter, Sachi, and their separation during some of Sachi's childhood years spent in Japan with her father. With affection and humor she recalls her own formative years in a Hollywood that made magic, not just money, learning her craft beside legendary stars like Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Joan Crawiord, and Debbie Reynolds, whose life in part inspired Shirley's bravura role in Postcards From the Edge. Finally, Shirley writes with honesty and incisive detail about her decision to return to the stage with a new show. Finding it both frightening and liberating, she reveals how it felt to lose her footing, and her confidence, when a series of devastating injuries force