97-Year-Old's New Career: Acting

Late Bloomer Mae Laborde Is Enjoying Her New Success

(AP) 
His description caught the eye of Sherrie Spillane, the veteran L.A. talent agent and ex-wife of the late crime novelist Mickey Spillane. Spillane decided she had to meet Laborde. The two got together for a tea-leaf reading (Laborde's hobby) — and the next thing Spillane knew, she had a new client.

"She's got this way about her that's so endearing that everybody falls in love with her," Spillane says. "She's got that cute little face and she's very funny."

Laborde also has nearly a century of experience to draw on when the director yells action.

She arrived in Los Angeles from her hometown of Fresno at the height of the Great Depression, meeting her husband when he was the conductor on L.A.'s fabled old Red Car trolley line that she used to take home from work.

A few years later, husband and baby daughter in tow, she moved into a tiny, straight-out-of-a-storybook house on a street so narrow that cars traveling in opposite directions can't pass if someone has parked at the curb. It was back in the day when Santa Monica was just a quaint little California town of beach cottages.

Seventy years later, many of those cottages have been razed in favor of multimillion-dollar "McMansions." Laborde's remains unchanged. Even the orchid-colored tile the young mother picked out for her 1930s-era bathroom remains.

As the years passed, Laborde always kept working at one job or another, going on to outlive both her husband, Nicholas, and their only child, Shirley.

A Girl Scout leader for her daughter's troop, she has kept in touch with most of her daughter's friends. Now in their 70s, they'll ask her for secrets to living a long life. She'll tell them to never retire.

When she was 89 Laborde took a police training course just for fun. She still cooks for herself, paints and raises tomatoes in her garden that she sells to a local restaurant.

But she'll drop whatever she's doing when there's a call for an audition.

Recently she landed a small role in a forthcoming movie opposite Ben Stiller. She'll be the grandmotherly lady sitting in a restaurant near Stiller and his girlfriend as they speculate what their lives will be like at that age.

"I don't know anyone else her age that could keep up with her," says Spillane, who has become both her agent and close friend.

"But then I don't know anyone else her age," Spillane adds with a laugh.

[ecuadoriana]

She's adorable! She reminds me of my own grandmother. I hope she continues acting for many many years to come.

My advice to Ms. Laborde: Stay away from the likes of Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchey, & all the other hollyweird tramps.

If anyone ever sees her out tripping the light fantastic & partying with Lindsay Lohan til the wee hours, or hanging on the arm of 50cent or K-Fed you are authorized to drag her home by her cute as a button ear & give her a serious talking to!