The world according to Shirley MacLaine

PASADENA, Calif. -- Everything about Shirley MacLaine screams grande dame, from her dancer's posture to her expertly applied makeup. Even her voice, with its slightly dismissive lilt, indicates a star of a certain age and magnitude.

Then MacLaine gets to talking, and dishing. The tough old broad in her takes over. Like so many of the characters she's played, including her latest in the Jennifer Aniston vehicle ''Rumor Has It," opening Christmas Day, she says what's on her mind -- and when she disagrees with what's on someone else's. She's direct to the point of bluntness. She isn't always kind. She can be unintentionally hilarious.

But at 71 (''I'll be 72 on my next birthday," she volunteers without flinching, a Hollywood rarity in and of itself), with a colorful past that includes a claim to numerous past lives, MacLaine continues to call them as she sees them. A direct question gets a surprisingly direct answer, another movie industry oddity. Here, for instance, is MacLaine on some of her recent costars:

Nicole Kidman (''Bewitched"): ''One of the best there is, really, right up there with Meryl Streep. We had long conversations about longevity."

Cameron Diaz (''In Her Shoes"): ''Cameron was really into [singer/boyfriend] Justin [Timberlake] and doing all that. She's a very good actress, by the way. She doesn't have to rely so much on the eye candy in my opinion. You don't want to be in competition with how beautiful your legs, body, face are. I mean, show it, but maybe not so many cuts of that."

Jennifer Aniston, whose breakup with Brad Pitt was in full tabloid swing by the time of reshoots on ''Rumor Has It": ''We had conversations because of what she was going through about life and 'Why have I signed up for this?' and 'What is my participation?' She is a person who takes responsibility and factors in her own accountability with everything in her life, and that interests me as a woman."

Oh, and singer Britney Spears, who has never costarred with MacLaine but seems to annoy her on many levels, at least when she isn't diverting the attention of the paparazzi in Malibu, where Spears lives and MacLaine stays when she's in town working: ''I get [attention from photographers] in Malibu if Britney Spears and the dancer aren't around," MacLaine says in reference to Spears's husband, Kevin Federline. ''And he's gone, so she's probably going back to mother. . . ."

Still, MacLaine is not without sympathy for Spears. As the older sister of actor/former lothario Warren Beatty, and having worked recently with some of the biggest female stars half her age, she's seen the paparazzi up close. She says she worries someone will get killed. She also says if she was coming up in today's anything-to-get-a-photograph climate, ''Oh man, I'd get a shotgun. . . . I'd be in the slammer now with those paparazzi."

Fortunately these days the photographers don't want much from MacLaine, except perhaps a picture of her with Terry, her dog and coauthor of sorts of ''Out on a Leash: Exploring the Nature of Reality and Love," one of 10 books MacLaine has written about her spiritual journey over the decades. As she puts it, ''They just want to be able to write a caption that says, 'Shirley's so crazy she thinks her dog wrote chapters of her book.' "

Of course, MacLaine's views are considered more -- if not quite -- mainstream today than when she first went ''Out on a Limb" with her fascination with other cultures and belief systems and interpretations of the beyond. She still considers herself a mystic, or predictor, and says she is now asked in all seriousness about the next earthquake or terrorist attack. She can't say for certain about either but senses the wind will be responsible for much of the damage to come.

''I just know Mother Nature is extremely upset with what we've done to her," MacLaine says. ''She wants to cleanse, she wants to rebalance, she wants to make things harmonious. And there's no judgment in Mother Nature's mind about how to accomplish that. She just wants to accomplish that."

MacLaine considers herself safer than most. An outspoken liberal, she lives off the electric grid in New Mexico, on 8,000 acres where she has her own wells for water and her own animals and gardens for food. MacLaine has a daughter from her lengthy marriage to Steve Parker (they divorced in the 1980s). A lifelong traveler who says the only places she hasn't been are Afghanistan and the South Pole, she says she now prefers staying at home and traveling inward, the most exotic destination of all. Lately, though, she's been leaving a lot for work, adding to a resume that famously began when she went on as the understudy in ''The Pajama Game" more than a half-century ago. She has appeared in more than 50 films, not to mention other Broadway plays and television miniseries, and earned numerous accolades, including an Academy Award for ''Terms of Endearment." She was nominated last week for a Golden Globe for ''In Her Shoes."

In ''Rumor Has It," MacLaine plays Katharine Richelieu, Aniston's outspoken and still-sexy grandmother, as well as the model for the Anne Bancroft character in ''The Graduate." It's not as complicated as it sounds. After getting engaged, Aniston learns that her long-dead mother ran away before her own wedding to be with a young man who had also had an affair with MacLaine's character. She sets out to find the guy, and what ensues is not unexpected.

MacLaine and Aniston, appearing together at a press event, have an easy and obvious rapport. They gab about getting through the Brangelina juggernaut. (''Like I was saying to Shirley today, I may as well pull my pants down at this point. They've seen everything else," says Aniston, sounding serene and looking preternaturally suntanned.) Of MacLaine, Aniston adds, ''It's her spirit" that's so striking, an opinion that co-star Mena Suvari seconds.

''Shirley's a blast," she says. ''I mean, what an honor. When I met her, I didn't know whether to shake her hand or hug her or bow, and she just threw her arms around me."

Rob Reiner could have had an awkward time of it with MacLaine, too. He took over the helm of ''Rumor Has It" when Ted Griffin, the writer and original director, was let go after only weeks of filming. Reiner wasn't the director she signed up to work with on the movie. But Reiner says MacLaine was a star -- not a diva -- on the set.

''Not only does she take direction, she asks for it," Reiner says. ''She's got great instinct, she's got great craft, and nine times out of 10 she'll hit" the right romantic comedy note.

MacLaine, scheduled to shoot Richard Attenborough's ''Closing the Ring" next spring, is mostly grateful that she isn't stuck playing ''the irascible old lady who should be stashed in the attic. That's the cliched thing for Hollywood to do with me." But MacLaine still considers herself vital, and vain. She says she still likes to look good in a movie -- and that she'd rather take a flattering chimera light to dinner than a man. But she doesn't understand young Hollywood's obsession with Botox injections and early eyelifts. She thinks all the fakery looks phony on-screen and that it's an indirect putdown of the women in the audience.

In fact, MacLaine wants to play old, but not quite yet. She says she's searching for her ''Driving Miss Daisy," or the female version of ''Scent of a Woman." For the right role she'd even be willing to forgo her trademark reddish hair for standard-issue gray. But she's only technically old enough to be the 36-year-old Aniston's grandmother, and she didn't want to look it either way. Her next book, tentatively titled ''Saging, Not Aging," may be another spiritual tome, but MacLaine understands she lives in the real world.

Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com.