Shirley MacLaine is an actress and author who has spent eight decades in the spotlight. She has made a career out of playing strong, quirky women who can be charming or cantankerous. Throughout her career, she has won an Academy Award, an Emmy, and six Golden Globes, as well as the Cecil B. DeMille Award and the Kennedy Center Honor, among others. As the dynamic actress celebrates her 90th birthday, we take a look back at her career.

She was born Shirley MacLaine Beaty on April 24, 1934 in Richmond, Virginia, and was named after child star Shirley Temple. She is the daughter of a psychology professor father and drama teacher mother, and is the older sister to actor Warren Beatty. She started ballet when she was 3 years old, and performed on stage for years before turning to acting.

During the summer before her senior year of high school, MacLaine went to New York City and worked in the chorus for a production of Oklahoma!. She returned to New York after graduating, and made her Broadway debut as an ensemble dancer in the production of Me and Juliet. She went from understudy to lead on The Pajama Game when lead actress Carol Haney was injured. A few months later, Jerry Lewis saw her perform and helped her get a contract with Paramount Pictures.

Her film debut was in 1955 in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, quickly followed by Artists and Models and Hot Spell. MacLaine was nominated for her first and second Academy Awards for Some Came Running in ’58 and The Apartment in ’60. She had a small role as the tipsy girl in Ocean’s 11, then was in All in a Night’s Work, Two for the Seesaw, got her third Oscar nod for Irma la Douce, then was in Gambit and Sweet Charity.

In the ‘70s, MacLaine starred in the short-lived sitcom Shirley’s World, she won an Emmy for the variety program Gypsy in My Soul, then got her fourth and fifth Academy Award nominations for the documentary The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir and the movie The Turning Point.

MacLaine finally struck Oscar gold with a win for Terms of Endearment as complicated mother and hard to please widow Aurora Greenway. She closed the ‘80s by playing the surly (and funny) Ouiser Boudreaux in Steel Magnolias, and soon starred in another mother-daughter movie opposite Meryl Streep in Postcards from the Edge.

She played a former First Lady in Guarding Tess, was in the Joan of Arc miniseries, was in the Bewitched movie, Rumor Has It…, and earned an Emmy nomination for playing Coco Chanel in the miniseries of the same name. MacLaine was in Valentine’s Day, guest starred in Downton Abbey and Glee, was in The Little Mermaid, and most recently she was in two episodes of Only Murders in the Building.