Texas Film Award
Shirley MacLaine and Terms of Endearment

When the 2010 Cinema Arts Festival Houston begins, Shirley MacLaine will have just wrapped shooting of her latest film, Bernie, in Austin and other Texas locations. Bernie, co-starring Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey, is being directed by Rick Linklater (HCAS board member and opening night guest at the 2009 festival). In 2007, Linklater appeared in the MFAH “Movies Houstonians Love” series and introduced the film he has called “my favorite film, period” — Vincent Minnelli’s 1958 classic, Some Came Running.

Some Came Running appeared three years after MacLaine’s feature film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry and Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models, in which her comedic, musical, and dancing talents were dazzling enough to propel her to stardom. Her performance in Some Came Running, as floozy Ginnie Moorehead, cast aside by Frank Sinatra and picked up by Dean Martin, revealed a greater dramatic acting range that brought her greater acclaim (and membership in the Rat Pack, which was otherwise a men’s club).

Others will have their own MacLaine classics to cite among their own favorites, including Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and Hal Ashby’s Being There, but the likely choice of most viewers, particularly in Houston, will be the locally-filmed dramatic comedy that gave the greatest demonstration of MacLaine’s comedic and dramatic acting range, Terms of Endearment (1983). MacLaine earned the Academy Award for Best Actress playing the unforgettable Aurora Greenway, difficult mother of Emma (Debra Winger) and reluctant lover of Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson).

Terms of Endearment was directed by James L. Brooks, who made the leap from television (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) to cinema with his rich screenplay and capable direction. The film was based on a novel by Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Brokeback Mountain), whose Texas background invested the characters with authenticity.

On November 13, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Auditorium, the Cinema Arts Festival will honor a Texas film classic and one of its key creative talents, as we did last year with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and its screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga. This year, we are inaugurating the Texas Film Award and giving it to the actress most responsible for Terms of Endearment and its lasting impression on moviegoers’ memories, Shirley MacLaine.

Following the screening, Ms. MacLaine will engage in a conversation with Houston-based Variety film critic Joe Leydon about Terms of Endearment and her extraordinary career.