Before she butted heads with Maggie Smith’s, “Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham” on Downton Abbey, Shirley MacLaine was Irma la Douce, Fran Kubelik, Deedee Rodgers and a host of other memorable characters on Broadway and in film. Before any of those parts, however, MacLaine was many things in the past lives she believes she has lived. These include a Moorish peasant girl, a medieval warrior, an orphan raised by elephants, a Japanese geisha and a model for post-impressionist painter Toulouse-Lautrec.

Previous lives extended to her beloved Rat Terrier, “Terry, ” whom she featured in her 2003 book, “Out on a Leash.” Terry, MacLaine is convinced, is a reincarnation of the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis.

“I have never known friendship and companionship like it,” she said of Terry recently. “We sleep cuddled up together every night so it’s a good thing I don’t have a man in my life. I would rather have a good, loyal dog than a man. It’s taken a few years to come to that conclusion and I’m happier for it. My love for Terry brings me to tears.”  See them together here. 

Image:  By Roland Godefroy from 1987 comes from Wikicommons media and is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license