Suddenly, MacLaine’s movie career has been reincarnated

Working alongside Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston on her latest movies, Shirley MacLaine sympathized over the paparazzi frenzy her co-stars endured.

Then she had her own little drama with celebrity-stalking photographers who massed outside a Malibu coffee shop where she had stopped with her canine soul mate, her terrier Terry – whom she believes she knew in a past life in Egypt, as she wrote about in “Out on a Leash.”

“I guess Britney and the dancer didn’t show up that day,” MacLaine snorts. “There were the paparazzi, about 30 of them outside.

“I was so appalled. They were kind of waiting for Terry to walk out and perhaps take a poop or something, because she’s famous herself, and what would I do about the poop? And would they make me mad? Because the whole point is, they want to make you mad, and then they get a good picture.”

Luckily, MacLaine says, she ran into two stuntmen she had worked with on “Cannonball Run II” (“or some dumb, stupid picture I made”). They gathered a group who huddled around MacLaine and whisked her and Terry to her car.

A best-selling author whose books include the spiritual memoir “Out on a Limb,” MacLaine, 71, had been content to take on the occasional acting role.

But she’s having one of her busiest years ever with three big studio films. After appearing in last summer’s “Bewitched,” she plays the grandmother of feuding sisters Diaz and Toni Collette in “In Her Shoes,” which opened Friday.

Coming in December is “Rumor Has It,” with MacLaine as the grandmother of a woman (Aniston) who discovers her family may have been the basis for the novel and film “The Graduate.”

“And I’m developing three more pictures to do after this,” she says. “I don’t know what the synchronicity is all about, but it’s there.”

Growing up in Virginia, MacLaine studied ballet, and she and younger brother Warren Beatty attended a drama school run by their mother.

In 1954, producer Hal Wallis caught MacLaine on Broadway in “The Pajama Game” and brought her to Hollywood. Her first film role was in Alfred Hitchcock‘s black comedy “The Trouble With Harry.”

She received four Oscar nominations before finally winning for her favorite role, as domineering mother Aurora in 1983’s “Terms of Endearment.”

MacLaine bemoans the way modern movies typically present older women as “non-sexual, uncolorful, eccentric.”

“But what is the perception of women in general on the screen?” she says. “That’s a problem right there, because Hollywood still doesn’t know what to do with women. Remember the days of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy and Susan Hayward … oh, my God, what happened?

“I’ve never cared whether a picture makes money or not. Now I care, because it’s all about whether they’ll finance the next one. And we’ve got to start making better pictures in Hollywood.”

The birthday bunch

Actor Fyvush Finkel is 83. Singer Jackson Browne is 57. Actor Robert Wuhl is 54. TV personality Sharon Osbourne is 53. Actor Tony Shalhoub is 52. Actor Scott Bakula is 51. Actor John O’Hurley is 51. Singer P.J. Harvey is 36. Actor/musician Steve Burns (“Blues Clues”) is 32. Singer Sean Lennon is 30. Actor Zachery Ty Bryan (“Home Improvement”) is 24.