Shirley MacLaine on her open marriage

She's been an actress since 1955, starred recently in Downton Abbey, and at 81 has another movie role coming up. She claims that she lived in Atlantis in a past life and a lot of other such things. Now she's in the news again after opening up on Sirius XM about her open marriage (which isn't news; she dished about it to Oprah Winfrey in 2011). It doesn't sound like a particularly good open marriage, but what do we know.

I post about this only because people have been saying I should. Excerpts from the (yuck) Daily Mail:

Shirley MacLaine says sleeping with other people is 'basis for a long-lasting marriage' (even though she ended up divorced)

She had the most unconventional of relationships with her husband Steve Parker.

But Shirley MacLaine has opened up to say sleeping with other people is the 'basis for a long-lasting marriage' — even though they ended up getting a divorce.

The Hollywood legend was married to Steve [in 1954], who she described as 'the love of my life,' and they got divorced in 1982. They managed to remain on good terms even after she discovered the film producer had been transferring huge sums of her money into a girlfriend's bank account....

While still married the 81-year-old had affairs with a slew of her high profile lovers, including Hollywood hardman Robert Mitchum, singer and actor Yves Montand, funnyman Danny Kaye and former Australian foreign minister Andrew Peacock.

But the Downton Abbey star does not believe this affected her relationship with her husband, saying: I guess you would say (we) "practiced an open marriage" in 1954, which was another lifetime.

'No one understood it. We did. He lived in Japan basically. I lived in America working, and this and that. We'd meet up, always great friends, traveled sometimes together.'...

The whole article (March 17, 2016).

Update later in the day: ABC News has put up an interview with her from some years back in which she explains the philosophy behind their open marriage quite well:



[Permalink]