Friends and colleagues praised her accomplishments in this life — and cracked jokes about the reincarnation believer's other lives.
Shirley MacLaineCULVER CITY, Calif. (AP) — It's not just a single life that gets toted up when Shirley MacLaine receives a career award. It's all her lives — past, present and future.
MacLaine earned the American Film Institute's life-achievement award Thursday night with friends and colleagues praising her accomplishments in this life — and cracking jokes about the reincarnation believer's other lives.
Co-stars Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Jack Black, Sally Field, Meryl Streep and others contributed to the loving roast of MacLaine, along with such friends, co-workers and admirers as Katherine Heigl, Don Rickles, Morgan Freeman and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.
"Tonight we're here to honor a person I have known, a person I have loved my whole life," said MacLaine's younger brother, Warren Beatty, the 2008 recipient of the AFI honor.
Some stars lovingly ribbed MacLaine for her belief that she has lived many past lives. Black, MacLaine's co-star in her current comic drama "Bernie," presented a hilarious reel of himself congratulating the actress at career honors from prehistoric times to the Elizabethan era to U.S. colonial days.
"This is not the first lifetime-achievement award she's won over the ages," Black said.
Carrie Fisher, who wrote the 1990 comic drama "Postcards from the Edge" that starred MacLaine and Streep, joked that MacLaine "is actually some future person's past life. Can you imagine that lucky bastard?"
Nicholson, MacLaine's fellow Academy Award winner from 1983's "Terms of Endearment," said MacLaine loves her audiences and "is the only person outside of the clergy promising them eternal life."
The 40th recipient of the annual AFI honor, MacLaine received the best-actress Oscar for "Terms of Endearment" and was nominated four other times for such films as 1958's "Some Came Running," 1960's "The Apartment" and 1977's "The Turning Point."
The awards show, held in a historic Sony Pictures soundstage where MGM shot "The Wizard of Oz," will air June 24 on TV Land.