Shirley MacLaine's Favorite Roles — From 'Terms of Endearment' to 'Steel Magnolias' and More!

Veteran star Shirley MacLaine danced her way from ballet classes to fame and fortune, crediting the hoofing for giving her the “mentality” and “work ethic” it took to make it in the Hollywood big leagues.

Here are MacLaine's ten favorite roles and what the Oscar winner, 90, says they mean to her.

Alfred Hitchcock “insisted I eat with him at every meal. He didn’t care what I was doing in the movie! Hitch was all about food. I feel very privileged that he included me in the highest priority of his life," she said.

"I wasn’t attracted to Jack [Lemmon]. He didn’t have that dangerous, complicated, sexual dominating confusion that I liked helping the men I was attracted to figure out," she explained of her leading man.

"It was from Bob Fosse that I realized energy was the primary requirement for a good performance on the stage, on the screen and in life," she noted of the iconic director and choreographer.

Playing a ballerina was old hat since “I was in recitals since I was three. Loved the audience. But I particularly loved the silence. The silence means, ‘Oh my, their rapt attention.’”

On playing Aurora: “My favorite part. I’m kind of like her. That’s the closest I’ve come to being like a character. I don’t know how difficult it was to play her … in principle, I won an Oscar for playing myself.”

MacLaine has fond memories of bonding with costars Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts, Sally Field and Olympia Dukakis after director Herbert Ross “told one of us or all of us we couldn’t act. We stayed friends after the movie but we never went to the director’s funeral.”

“I’m not like my character. I believe I’ve lived before, but ditzy, I’m not. I don’t think you go out of style when you’re living in the present most of the time. That’s what I think I do," she said.

“I had fun on this film. If you want to make fun of my New Age beliefs, go ahead — as long as they’re funny jokes. I believe: ‘He who laughs at himself never ceases to be amused,'" she noted.

“Maggie [Smith] and I don’t like to get up and walk around a lot anymore. So we sat and we reminisced about life, lovers, the business and directors," she explained of working on the PBS show.

“I love acting. I love the familiar environment. I love playing other people. I don’t plan to quit. I love Rose’s spite and her spunk. I just loved how she was all over the place," she gushed.