Shirley MacLaine Quotes

We don't have enough young, female antiheroes. We don't accept women as antiheroes the way we do the men.

There's a lot of good roles for men, always, and for very young girls. But for women, not so many.

I grew up with all boys in my family, where there was no place for girlie stuff. But it's amazing to walk into my house now. Everything is pink!

It's still not easy to find roles that offer more complex images of women.

It's nice to see more of those meaty female characters emerging because so often in the industry, it's always about the males.

I've wondered if 'Harry Potter' would have been as big if it was 'Harriet Potter.' Now that I've written a screenplay - and raising a son in particular - I'm looking at story content and realizing how limited women are onscreen.

In commercial cinema, roles for heroines are limited to being simple or glamorous. I don't want to fall into an image trap.

I won't say there aren't 'smart' roles for women, but the variety is limited. I feel the real representation is not widely available in Bollywood.

I'm not sure if I should say this, and it might sound arrogant of me, but I think there is a tendency to view female characters as consumer products.

Not all the roles that I've gotten were stereotypical, but in Korea, especially for TV, it's a bit limited for women in their twenties and thirties. There aren't enough female roles.

TV is nothing without its women.

There has to be this balance of reality for a woman. I don't want to play women who just serve a purpose for the script.

I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men - with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president and with all beings.

No female - young, old, black or white - could ever play the knight-on-charger with meager experience. If she presented herself as the human embodiment of national unity and world peace, everyone would have fallen down laughing.

I could never be a woman, 'cause I'd just stay home and play with my breasts all day.

What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary

I was a tomboy running around in the garden. I used to play on a local cricket team. I grew up with all boy cousins, for the most part, and my brother.

We've gotta dispense with calling guys who are effeminate or who throw like girls "sissies." You know why? Because that diminishes women, and that can lead to such things as you decking your woman in a hotel elevator in New Jersey with your fist.

I’m very worried about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s gotten worse than ever and it’s related to their being either high- or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed, with whom, and how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.

Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

[My mother] was the oldest of two sisters and two brothers, and she grew up with her brothers, who were about her age. She grew up, to the age of ten, like a wild colt, and then all of a sudden that was over. They had forced on her her 'woman's destiny' by saying, 'This isn't done, this isn't good, this isn't worthy of a lady.'

There's always male roles I want to play. I'm so annoyed when I watch movies and go, "That could have been played by a woman."

Women in the postfeminist era, while supposedly strong and commanding and equal to men in every sense, looked weaker and smaller than ever before.

I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!