I was Charlemagne's lover, reveals Shirley MacLaine

The Telegraph, May 18, 2000
By Philip Delves Broughton

CONFIRMING her reputation as one of Hollywood's quirkiest stars, the actress Shirley MacLaine claims in a new book that she was a lover of the Emperor Charlemagne in a past life and of his reincarnation in this one.

Miss MacLaine has long been fascinated by reincarnation, but her latest book, Camino, takes her further down this path. The book is based on a walk she took along the 500-mile pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

She writes that she was guided along the way by visions and characters from ancient civilisations who revealed her past lives. "I was a Moorish girl who was tending to the sick," she told a television interviewer. "As time progressed, I went deeper . . . and back into time further."

In this life, Miss MacLaine, sister of the actor Warren Beatty, claims to have had an affair with Olaf Palme, the assassinated Swedish prime minister. She believes Palme was a reincarnation of Charlemagne, who died in AD 814 after conquering much of western Europe, and Charlemagne was just one of many lovers she says she had in past lives.

Besides taking famous lovers, Miss MacLaine says she also had visions of androgynous people giving birth to androgynous children and that she herself was androgynous. Miss MacLaine, 66, the star of Terms of Endearment and The Apartment, has always stood apart from the rest of Hollywood.

In her previous eight books, she has waded ever deeper into mystical fields claiming in one that extraterrestrials had landed on the front porch of her beach home in Malibu.

She says that her friends repeatedly told her not to write about her karmic destinies and her contact with aliens. But she brushed them off. She said: "I'm old enough to have the right to be innovative and get a big kick out of the people who think I'm a nut case."