The Theater: The Trouper

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The experts differ about her range. Arthur Laurents would limit her to playing "middleclass women. She'll never be able to play a lady with airs, and, somehow, she's not quite right for mothers." But Critic John Mason Brown sees "something lyrical about her which shines through the drabbest or most disillusioned of her characterizations." And Jose Ferrer claims that "she could handle anything. She would make a positively bloodcurdling Lady Macbeth." Helen Hayes pays her probably the highest professional tribute of all: "She has perfect timing and perfect reading, and always has complete control of herself, her part and her audience. I have often gone back to watch her a second and a third time, trying to figure out how she does it, because the first time she has made it seem so effortless that I have forgotten I'm watching an actress."

Every Role Is Sympathetic. Shirley herself pins most of her faith on her audiences: "They're a fetish with me, because I know they can tell when anything is synthetic." Would she play an unsympathetic role? "To play a bitch would be working against my own personality. But to play a woman who occasionally makes mistakes and is not always noble, that would be close to what I am myself. There's really no such thing as an unsympathetic role. People are handed traits—the actor's job is to make an audience understand why they have these traits."

Shirley treats her new-found success as warily as if it were a time bomb: "I feel any minute now somebody's going to poke me and say it's time to get up ... I feel a little like a movie star, but a movie star would look like one and I never have."

She has no plans beyond the new movie and the Broadway musical already scheduled for fall. She would like to make her first trip to Europe soon, but does not want to go alone. She is thinking vaguely of buying a summer house on Cape Cod. Most likely, she'll stay in her comfortable apartment eleven floors above Manhattan, tending her parakeet and poodle, rearranging furniture, watering her plants, watching late-at-night movies on television. There is still only one thing of primary importance: her audience. Says Shirley: "I'll act as long as they'll have me."