Shirley MacLaine five competitive Golden Globe Awards, and received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 1998 ceremony. Named after actress Shirley Temple (who was six years old at the time), Shirley MacLean Beaty was born on April 24, 1934, in Richmond, Virginia. Her father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of psychology, public school administrator, and real estate agent, and her mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a drama teacher, originally from Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. MacLaine's younger brother is the actor, writer, and director Warren Beatty; he changed the spelling of his surname when he became an actor.
Shirley Temple and Temple acted in three of the sixteen episodes. Temple's son made his acting debut in the Christmas episode, "Mother Goose". The series was popular but faced issues. The show lacked the special effects necessary for fairy tale dramatizations, sets were amateurish, and episodes were not telecast in a regular time-slot. The show was reworked and released in color in September 1960 in a regular time-slot as "The Shirley Temple Show". It faced stiff competition from "Maverick", "Lassie", "Dennis the Menace", the 1960 telecast of "The Wizard of Oz", and the Walt Disney anthology television series however, and was canceled