After a week off, such as I wrote on the main page I needed a break, PfeifferTheFace finally comes back with the interesting interview with Michelle Pfeiffer which did so much stir among PFANS… for that reason, because it is talked about us: PFANS wrote with PF.

Well, now I have to be sincere, one of the reasons because I needed an exhale was this interview… perhaps it did that I feel a bit more sensitive regarding this site and regarding of being a “pfan”, it made me think a lot about it…

… and besides you know, after all the work made during these last months here, you have been able to prove it —and now I’m exhausted… tired…— so for that reason I’ve been thinking about if it compensates me, you know, my time, my pocket, my relationships, my friendships… my life… so it is the reason because I’ve had to close the forum (it has been so hard work daily to maintain it, and it isn’t worth it because it doesn’t compensate to me)…

… and so with this sensitive feeling with the site in my mind, I’ve to add that I felt after a first read of this interview published by The Washington Post [you can read below]… so maybe my feelings were a bit more desolated… I felt a bit dissapointment…

And only, ONLY thanks to those pfans who are donating and supporting this site I thought on keep on the work, at least maintaining the main site… I think it is fair.

Well, let’s come back to the main question of this post: the “famous” interview with Michelle Pfeiffer:

I’ve been studing this interview, and when I read it for umpteenth time I felt a bit more relaxed… besides I’ve read the comments of pfans around it, so I’d like to comment about it now.

In the first place I’ve to say I’ve read a lot of bad things regarding the journalist… well, actually, that I think that the journalist is a Pfeiffer fan, not a pfan, but a fan. I think that he did his homework regarding the interview, and he did really interesting questions… questions that the most of us whish to know, at least I do. I think it is a very good interview.

“Your golden age was 1987 to 1993“… OMG! I think so too… Isn’t it true? please, let me know the good movies of Michelle or her great successes since the middle nineties… (not your fav movies, but the good movies… of course). And the only reason of it is because she has wanted so…

I’d like to remember the part of a review by Brian D Johnson from Mcacleans.ca (in a review of Chéri) where it is talked about it, I think the critic describes very well that:

“Meryl Streep may be the designated Best Actress of Her Generation. But I’ve always thought Michelle Pfeiffer could be at least as good if given the same opportunities. She’s never had a chance to prove her full range, because her roles have been constricted by a handicap or two. The main one, of course, is her distracting beauty, which is devastating on screen—and off. [...] Pfeiffer’s other handicap has been her apparent lack of ambition. After a string of electric performances in the 1980s, from Scarface to The Fabulous Baker Boys, for the past two decades she has kept her career on cruise-control, taking on safe, undemanding roles while focusing on her family. But that lack of obvious ambition is also what makes her such a good actor. Unlike her beauty, her acting is always invisible. With Streep, you often feel you’re watching a performance, and there’s a something showy about the way she carves out a big scene, whether she’s doing comedy (The Devil Wears Prada) or drama (Doubt). But Pfeiffer’s style is modest to a fault. [...]

Pfeiffer could have got the most brilliant career in Hollywood if she had wanted! So please, don’t let’s hit the ceiling when we read “Your golden age was 1987 to 1993” beacuse is really true!

You know, I love Michelle as an actress and of couse I really admire her… but that sentence is also true, and I’ve to accept it. The journalist has simply said that many of us think but anybody have never said.

Later I began to feel really proud because you can prove that the journalist has visited this site before making the interview: “The people whose pfoolish hearts pfell pfor you, your pface, your pfilms, etc…”. And of course we can be really sure that he has read our comments and thoughts and discussion threads… and who can do it so? Only who is really interested o Michelle and her career.

And of course, it is made by someone who respects us: “The sound you hear is a million pfans holding their breath, crossing their pfingers, jonesing for more heartbreak.” asking her about future projects…

And also there is the subject of the “Trekkies Pfans”… well, I could guess that Michelle didn’t care about her fans, actually it isn’t a must for her… we are pfans because we admire her, independently if she know it or not, We love her anyway.

But I’ve read that the most of us are annoyed and bothered for her words: “Like Trekkies. I have fans. I have puh-fans.” Well, in the first place I’m not triying forgive her for her words, I just trying understand and explain that she is saying (or at least that her words have meant for me): we all here know that “Trekkies” are fans of Star Trek saga, so that she uses the word “Trekkies” isn’t that she think we are fans of the series… it is simply her way of call us “freakies” as people a bit obsessed with something… and actually, aren’t we a bit so?

“I have puh-fans. They say things? They talk to each other? Well, you know, I’m not connected in that way. It’s probably healthier. I don’t have time, honestly.” Isn’t it actually a way to be a bit freaky? Isn’t it the behavior of a freaky?

Am not I pretty freaky for maintaining this site and spend a little off and free time working on this project?…

I think she haven’t said any lie… simply it the way of the word.

Such I’ve said above… I’m a pfan, I’m proud of being a pfan… and anyway I’ll keep on being a pfan.

Actually, thinking about it, this interview didn’t tell me something that I didn’t know… She is La Pfeiffer… it is the curse of Pfans.

She’s Pfine, Thanks

By Dan Zak
The Washington Post
June 28, 2009

NEW YORK — The list of things Michelle Pfeiffer doesn’t want to hear includes this sentence: “The way I see it, your golden age was 1987 to 1993.”

And yet some of us are idiots, and say it anyway.

She responds with silence. The hotel room freezes over. So, we fumble: Do you, um, think in those terms? In phases?

“No, not really,” she says softly.

An excruciating pause follows.

“Nm-mm,” she adds for emphasis, shaking her head.

Her blue eyes shimmer. She will win this staring contest.

“I sort of don’t look back.”

At all?

“No, not really,” she repeats. Then the ice thaws a bit. “I‘ve always had this fear of getting stuck in the past. Becoming, like, Norma Desmond or something.”

Michelle Pfeiffer — siren of cinema, three-time Oscar nominee, the woman on the cover of People’s first-ever issue of “The 50 Most Beautiful People in World” — is 51.

Gloria Swanson was 51 when she played the delusional diva Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” about a movie star whose glamour wilted to grotesquerie as her audience moved on to younger idols.

But to become Norma, a star must believe in her own stardom. Norma watches her own movies all day, holed up in her mausoleum of a mansion. Michelle, when she catches “The Witches of Eastwick” on cable, switches the channel. She’ll watch her movies once, but never again. She’s too critical of her work, she says. It’s painful to watch.

She’s been a movie star for 25 years, but no part of the job seems to work for her. Michelle Pfeiffer hates parties. She hates premieres. She’s bad at interviews. She mourns the privacy she sacrificed long ago, though moving her family to Northern California and taking a five-year hiatus from movies helped a bit. If she had her way, she would not be cooped up in a hotel room in Manhattan talking about her latest movie, “Chéri,” even though it’s her first real lead role in almost a decade — never mind those two recent movies that went straight to DVD.

Twenty years ago she played a doe-eyed girl victimized by social predators in “Dangerous Liaisons.” Now, in another adaptation of French literature with the same director, she plays a wealthy courtesan named Lea de Lonval who starts to feel the tiny ravages of time when she shacks up with a man half her age.

“Mmm,” she says, contemplating these career bookends. “Literally, the virgin and the whore. And everything in between, from then until now.”

Where is Michelle Pfeiffer now?

Hard to say. She’s coy. She sits right here, close enough for her wrinkles to show, but she might as well be a million miles away. The eyes are otherworldly. The face seems cared for, but not drastically altered. She looks — everybody says this — good. And it matters. Beauty is an integral part of her career, and now she’s playing a character who must reconcile her aging looks with her chosen profession.

The pfans, naturally, are excited for this movie, which came out last week. You know, the pfans, with a “pf”?

“The what?” she asks.

The pfans.

“I don’t know what that is,” she says.

P-F-A-N-S. The people whose pfoolish hearts pfell pfor you, your pface, your pfilms, etc. They’re the wonderful people out there, in the dark reaches of blogosphere, who kept talking about you while you were gone, who refer to you as “our Michelle.”

“Oh, my gosh,” she says, laughing. “Like Trekkies. I have fans. I have puh-fans. They say things? They talk to each other? Well, you know, I’m not connected in that way. It’s probably healthier. I don’t have time, honestly.”

She laughs again. This is either rehearsed ignorance or gee-whiz nonchalance. Either way, the sound you hear is a million pfan hearts breaking.

* * *

Her voice lowers to a horrified whisper when talking about one of her first jobs in Hollywood. She played a character called Bombshell in a 1979 TV series spinoff of “Animal House.”

“Oh my gosh, it was so bad,” she says, almost inaudibly, crossing her eyes for effect. “And I wore hot pants and high heels, and they had falsies on me out to here. It was just really horrible and, in a way, it was a blessing because I never wanted to go back to that.”

Born in Santa Ana, Calif., Pfeiffer was a beach bum who bagged groceries at Vons supermarket and was crowned Miss Orange County in the late ’70s. She got an agent and played Tony Danza’s girlfriend, Suzie Q, a waitress who dreams of becoming an actress, in 1980’s “The Hollywood Knights.” Two years later, with no vocal or dance training, she strutted her way through “Grease 2” in a pink satin jacket. No one came out of that movie looking good, which is why, rumor has it, Brian De Palma didn’t want to consider her for the role of Tony Montana’s cokehead girlfriend in “Scarface.”

But she got that role, too, and created her first enduring cinematic image by entering the film in a glass elevator, wearing a backless teal dress slit to her hips. She had the right look, a tractor-beam allure, and now she was playing a bombshell with substance.

“I think it legitimized me, in a way,” Pfeiffer says of “Scarface.” Irresistible beauty was “part of the tragedy of the character. In the same way it’s part of the tragedy of Lea [in "Chéri"]. Their survival depends on their beauty.”

So it was for Pfeiffer herself, even after she took 10 years of acting classes, even when she entered her golden age.

“She’s the most wonderful woman that ever lived,” gushes Matthew Broderick in the 1985 fantasy “Ladyhawke.”

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Kurt Russell tells her in the 1988 potboiler “Tequila Sunrise.”

“I must have you or die,” utters John Malkovich in “Dangerous Liaisons.”

Two movies made her the superstar she insists she never intended to be. In 1989’s “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” she stumbled into Jeff and Beau Bridges‘ cabaret act as Susie Diamond, a sarcastic call girl with a decent voice and an animal magnetism. She bewitched the Baker boys by singing “More Than You Know” as her audition piece, and immortalized herself by rendering “Makin’ Whoopee” on top of a grand piano.

It’s an iconic moment. Pfeiffer, in a red dress under a hazy spotlight, furls and unfurls on the piano as the camera circles her, catching every gorgeous curve but unable to penetrate Susie Diamond’s true nature. It was a perfect marriage of actor and character. Equally iconic was her Catwoman in 1992’s “Batman Returns.” Pfeiffer, vacuum-sealed in a leather suit, played the villain as a fetish gone horribly wrong.

Sexpot and serious actress. Talented and tantalizing.

“I started out really just hoping to make a living,” she says. “I’m sure a lot of people were surprised that I became famous. It wasn’t really my agenda. . . . There was no reason for me to succeed.”

“Hot” and “ubiquitous,” this paper called her in 1989.

“Michelle Pfeiffer: The Problems of Being Perfect” went a Rolling Stone cover headline from 1992.

Wrote Roger Ebert in his “Baker Boys” review: “This is one of the movies they will use as a document, years from now, when they begin to trace the steps by which Pfeiffer became a great star.”

* * *

And then, phase 2.

She’s rumored to have passed on “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Thelma and Louise” and “Basic Instinct.” She adopted a baby girl in 1993, married TV writer/producer David E. Kelley that same year, had a son with him, and made People’s beautiful people list six times that decade while turning out subpar movies (“Dangerous Minds,” “Up Close & Personal,” “The Story of Us“). After 2002’s “White Oleander,” Pfeiffer dropped off the radar to spend time at home, without a glance backward.

She’s not big on mementos, but there are things she wishes she’d kept. The red dress from “Baker Boys” might’ve fetched a small fortune for charity, she says. Same goes for the cat suit. She did save a whip from “Batman Returns,” but she’s not sure where it is.

In her world, there are no Pfeiffer movies, only Pfeiffer paintings. Oils are her hobby. She paints portraits. She has a trove of them in her basement. All are unfinished.

“I’m about to gesso over them,” she says, waving her hand through the air. “Wipe them out and start over.”

* * *

The duties of a 21st-century female movie star include:

1. Loudly champion a cause.

2. Sell age-defying makeup.

3. Strut on red carpets regularly.

4. Get a prime-time TV series.

Sharon Stone, Angela Bassett and Holly Hunter are hitting 51 this year, and they dabble in these duties to varying degrees. For the most part, Michelle Pfeiffer refrains.

“It used to make my old agent crazy,” she says, slipping into a haughty accent: ” ‘Well, Michelle, Michelle, you know, it really would be good for you to be seen. It just reminds people that you’re around.’ ” She rolls her eyes.

After small roles in “Hairspray” and “Stardust,” Pfeiffer watched helplessly as two movies went straight to DVD. In “I Could Never Be Your Woman,” she hooks up with Paul Rudd, who is 11 years her junior. In “Personal Effects,” the love interest is Ashton Kutcher, who is 20 years younger. Distribution deals for both films went sour.

“It was all really mixed up,” she says, putting her hand to her forehead in exasperation.

Now she finally has a movie that’s all about her, co-starring a love interest who is 23 years younger, so she’s being a good sport with the media. She’s skinny as a stick on the cover of July’s In Style magazine. She’s giving interviews about how she hates the predatory tone of the word “cougar.” She stammered through Letterman and “The View” and “The Early Show,” where anchor Harry Smith opened his interview with, “You mind my saying you look terrific?”

No, she doesn’t mind. Her looks, as always, can’t be ignored. And now — playing a legendary beauty confronting society’s changing expectations — neither can her age. In one memorable shot in “Chéri,” the camera holds her face in close-up for a solid 30 seconds. The lighting grows harsher, until her face seems drained, lopsided, alien. Old. Un-Pfeifferlike.

“She seemed quite uniquely qualified” for this role, says “Chéri” director Stephen Frears. “Her career, her life has been so involved with beauty that it must’ve been a blessing and a burden.”

For her, the age thing (like the golden-age thing) is just another contrivance.

“It’s on people’s minds,” she says, resigned. “I think people are struggling with the concept of how much do you let go and age gracefully. How much do you try to, you know, fight it and stave it off?”

Good question. How much of Norma Desmond is actually in Michelle Pfeiffer, and what should she let go, and what must she keep, and is another golden age possible, and how is she really doing at this precarious point in her career?

“You know what?” she says. “I’m fine.”

So there it is. She’s fine, if a bit tired. She’s more than you’ll ever know.

As for what comes next, there’s a potential project that would start in the fall. She may be recharged by then, she says. She may do it. (The sound you hear is a million pfans holding their breath, crossing their pfingers, jonesing for more heartbreak.)

Source: The Washington Post

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• Junio 27, 2009 | A funny interview with Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend from Netherlands
• Junio 27, 2009 | Preview of ‘Chéri’ from CNN with Interviews the Cast & Crew
• Junio 25, 2009 | What film role would Michelle Pfeiffer like to reprise? according E!News