Michelle Pfeiffer

Michelle Pfeiffer: A Character Actress in a Siren's Body

Roger Ebert, watching Michelle Pfeiffer slither across a grand piano in a red dress in *The Fabulous Baker Boys*, reached for Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe and predicted the film would "be used as a document, years from now, when they begin to trace the steps by which Pfeiffer became a great star." He was half right. She became a great star. What the sequence actually documents is four months of voice training, because she insisted on singing every note herself.

Vons, Then Fantasy Island

She was born on 29 April 1958 in Santa Ana, California, to Richard Pfeiffer, an air-conditioning contractor, and Donna Jean Taverna, a housewife, both from North Dakota. Her younger sister Dedee also became an actress. She graduated from Fountain Valley High School in 1976, worked a supermarket checkout at Vons while attending Golden West College, and briefly trained as a court stenographer.

The route in was a beauty pageant. She won Miss Orange County in 1978 and placed sixth in Miss California, which got her an agent. Television came first — *Fantasy Island*, *CHiPs*, *Delta House* — and she took classes at the Beverly Hills Playhouse under Milton Katselas, who taught her, she has said, to tell the difference between what an actor would do and what a character would do. Her other coach, Peggy Feury, told her to play as many different kinds of character as she could. She has been following that instruction for forty years.

Two Years in the Wilderness

*Grease 2* (1982) gave her a first lead at twenty-three and very nearly ended her. The film failed; her own agent later admitted the association stopped her getting work. Brian De Palma refused to audition her for *Scarface* until the producer Martin Bregman insisted. As Elvira Hancock, the cocaine-glazed trophy wife, she gave the 1983 film its cold centre. Richard Corliss wrote in *Time* that "most of the large cast is fine: Michelle Pfeiffer is better." Dominick Dunne told *Vanity Fair* readers she was "on the verge of stardom."

The Great Run

She got there in 1987, in *The Witches of Eastwick*, and then went on one of the more remarkable runs in modern American film. *Married to the Mob* (1988) put her in a curly brunette wig and a Brooklyn accent and started six consecutive years of Golden Globe nominations. *Dangerous Liaisons* (1988) cast her as Madame de Tourvel, the virtuous woman destroyed by John Malkovich's seducer; Hal Hinson wrote in *The Washington Post* that "nothing is harder to play than virtue, and Pfeiffer is smart enough not to try. Instead, she embodies it." It won her the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress and her first Oscar nomination.

*The Fabulous Baker Boys* (1989) brought the Golden Globe for Best Actress and a second Oscar nomination, and remains the most acclaimed performance of her career. *The Russia House* (1990) brought another Golden Globe. She founded her own company, Via Rosa Productions, in 1990, and was by then earning a million dollars a picture.

In *Frankie and Johnny* (1991) she played a waitress opposite Al Pacino, casting that many thought absurd — she was held to be too beautiful for an ordinary woman, and Kathy Bates, who had originated the part on stage, said so. Pfeiffer took it precisely because it "wasn't what people would expect."

Selina Kyle

Then *Batman Returns* (1992). She replaced Annette Bening, trained in kickboxing, and built a performance in three layers — the meek Selina, the fall, and the thing that gets up afterwards, with each version still faintly visible inside the next. Reviewing the film for *The Seattle Times*, Moira Macdonald wrote that Pfeiffer "doesn't just steal the movie — she owns it," noting how her voice "drops down an oaky octave," how the movement is at once "graceful and slightly awkward," and that "some of her movie's greatest moments are when she's just quietly watching." *Premiere* judged the black patent costume the character's most iconic look. It is still, by common consent, the definitive screen Catwoman.

*Love Field* (1992), the first film from her own company, won her the Silver Bear at Berlin and a third Oscar nomination; *The New York Times* said she was "again demonstrating that she is as subtle and surprising as she is beautiful." Scorsese's *The Age of Innocence* (1993) followed, then *Wolf* (1994) and the hugely profitable *Dangerous Minds* (1995).

Leaving, and Coming Back

She wound up Via Rosa in 1999 and moved into semi-retirement to raise her family. She surfaced for *What Lies Beneath* (2000) and for *White Oleander* (2002), in which Stephen Holden judged her murderous artist "the most complex screen performance of her career," and then took a four-year absence altogether.

The comeback in 2007 was double and villainous: the racist station manager Velma Von Tussle in *Hairspray*, a part she found difficult precisely because of the bigotry, and the witch Lamia in *Stardust*, whom Holden called "as deliciously evil a witch as the movies have ever invented." A second, larger return came in 2017 — *Where Is Kyra?*, which *Rolling Stone* called the performance of her career; Ruth Madoff in HBO's *The Wizard of Lies*, which brought an Emmy nomination; Aronofsky's *Mother!*; and *Murder on the Orient Express*. She joined the Marvel films as Janet van Dyne from 2018, took a Golden Globe nomination for *French Exit* (2020), and played Betty Ford in *The First Lady* (2022).

Why Michelle Is Called a Genius

The critic's phrase for her — a character actress in a screen siren's body — is the most accurate thing anyone has said about her, and it identifies the actual skill. Pfeiffer's gift is not range in the usual sense of accents and wigs, though she has those. It is her capacity to use her own face as material rather than as an asset: to make beauty a fact about the character that the character has to live with, and sometimes to withhold it entirely. The Catwoman performance works because the glamour is deployed as a weapon the character is inventing in real time. Tourvel works because virtue is played as a physical condition rather than a mood.

The people who use the word are serious. Pauline Kael named her a favourite. Brian D. Johnson argued in 2009 that with the same opportunities she could be as revered as Meryl Streep. *The Hollywood Reporter* has said she "is too seldom ranked among the best of her generation," and Charles Taylor wrote in 2016 that no actor of the preceding decade rivalled her versatility.

The counter-case has to be stated plainly. She has no formal training and has admitted feeling fraudulent because of it. She is an interpreter, not an author; the one time she built a production company she wound it up after nine years. She took a four-year break at the height of her powers, and her selectivity means the body of work is thinner than her contemporaries'. And a good deal of her reputation for being underrated rests on critics who spent twenty years writing about her cheekbones — an injustice, but also a reminder that the case for her rests on argument rather than on a shelf of statuettes. She has three Oscar nominations and no Oscar.

Legacy

She was one of the defining faces of the 1980s and 1990s, appeared on the cover of *People*'s first "Most Beautiful People" issue in 1990 and five more times that decade, and took a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007 and a handprint ceremony at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in April 2025. She married David E. Kelley in 1993, adopted a daughter that March and had a son in 1994, and became a grandmother in 2024. In 2019 she launched Henry Rose, the first fragrance line to be both Cradle to Cradle Certified and EWG Verified. Australian cricketers, for reasons of pure phonetic accident, still call a five-wicket haul "a Michelle."

Achievements

• Silver Bear for Best Actress — 1993
• BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role — 1990
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama — 1990
• Worked as film actor, model and singer