From Vogue Australia comes this very interesting article-interview with Michelle Pfeiffer during the promotion of Chéri:

Australia

Vogue | August, 2009

Belle Epoque

In her new film role as a fading beauty, Michelle Pfeiffer proves she keeps getting better with age.

Words: David Michael

Turning the big five-zero has always been a landmark age in life, but not many people have to sit around like Michelle Pfeiffer and discuss it over the duration of two days. Such conversation must be awkward and breed self-consciousness because for 50-year-old actresses such talk normally translates into “you used to be pretty and popular, but now you’re old and not so in demand“.

Yet perhaps it’s the de rigueur topic of Pfeiffer’s time promoting her latest film Chéri simply because the actress is an astonishing advertisement for being 50. When we meet in a Berlin hotel room, Pfeiffer, dressed casually in jeans and a green satin short-sleeved top with a silver shawl wrapped around her shoulders, certainly looks nowhere near her age.

“Today,” she says, smiling at the frankly unavoidable compliment. “When I’m working, I’m pretty regimented in taking care of myself, but when I’m not working and presenting myself to crowds of people, you know, I get a little chubby and a little puffy, and have a little fun.”

It’s no surprise that she admits to not being one for counting off the years. The immaculately angled cheekbones, flawless skin and startling sky-blue eyes have provided her with the unwavering foundations to defy nature. The only noticeable evidence I can see of the passage of time about her is the addition of a regal and serene air.

“Turning 50 has been incredibly liberating for me and that surprised me, because it’s not looming ahead of you anymore,” reflects Pfeiffer. “It’s here. It comes and nothing happens – you don’t shrivel up overnight.”

Far from it, when you consider the new benefits she is enjoying when it comes to her work. “It seems my leading man gets younger the older I get,” she laughs. “People don’t seem to cast people of the same age. Lucky for me I don’t really mind it.”

Her latest role is proof of that. Based on the 1920 novel by French writer Colette, Chéri is set in an opulent and decadent Paris. Pfeiffer is perfectly cast as Léa de Lonval, a wealthy Parisian courtesan who takes her pick of young lovers before falling for her latest younger man – the torpid hero (Rupert Friend) of the title.

It’s a film that reunites her with British director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, with whom she worked on Dangerous Liaisons more than 20 years ago. Then, she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the fiercely virtuous Madame de Tourvel, who’s relentlessly pursued by john Malkovich’s Vicomte de Valmont. This time, the tables are turned. In their dictating of respective battles of the sexes, there are similarities between Léa and Glenn Close’s Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons. Revolutionaries of their time, both characters could conceivably be crassly labelled as “cougars” in today’s vernacular.

“I hate that title,” spits Pfeiffer, with a look of disdain that breaks her composed indifference. “It just sounds so predatory.”

“Chéri was during a time when women didn’t have independence and it certainly came at a cost,” she explains.

“I think there’s a lot of Colette in Léa, in the same way she was furiously independent and paid a price. Women didn’t have their own money or own real estate then, so in those ways I think she was very much ahead of her time.”

Despite her brazen poise, when Léa unexpectedly falls for Chéri, she gains a dawning self-awareness that the beauty she has traded on to gain her fame and fortune is beginning to fade. It’s a particularly poignant role for an actress who has been seen as one of the true beauties in Hollywood, and enjoys her 51st birthday a week after our meeting.

Although, as Pfeiffer suggests, the film’s story is not restricted to Hollywood.

“We are not any more beauty obsessed than the rest of the world,” reasons Pfeiffer. “It’s only ‘particularly in Hollywood’ because it’s recorded by the media and everyday people are not think the themes of the film are universal: the issues of ageing and our youth-obsessed culture, the value we put on youth and these taboos we attribute to age differences, and certainly the woman being older than the man and those inherent double standards.”

By her own admission when Pfeiffer set out to pursue her acting career, her first roles didn’t contain such heady notions. Having won the Miss Orange County beauty pageant, the “rebellious teen”, then working as a checkout operator, decided to get a resume of half-truths together to pursue an acting career. She got her first role in a television series called Delta House as “the bombshell”.

Naive and vulnerable in her new Los Angeles surroundings, she was taken in by a quasi-religious cult that succeeded in draining her earnings. It was her marriage to actor Peter Horton (of Thirtysomething fame) that provided her with safer ground and on their honeymoon in 1982 she discovered she’d snagged her first lead role, in Grease 2.

When we discuss the belle époque, free-flowing champagne period of Chéri and I ask her for her own favourite champagne-related moment, talk turns to the role that first transcended her one-dimensional pretty-girl image.

“I went through this gruelling process of auditioning for Scarface – it went over months and months,” recalls Pfeiffer, of getting the part of Al Pacino’s cocaine-addled wife in the film, shortly after Grease. “By the end of it, I didn’t even want to see those people again, as they put me through hell! Anyway, I was leaving town one day and I found out on my way to the airport that I got the part. My friend who drove me to the airport showed up with a bottle of champagne and two coffee mugs, and we sat in the parking lot at LAX and drank champagne before I got on the plane.”

Four years later, Pfeiffer had cause to drink a whole magnum of it when in 1987 her performance in The Witches of Eastwick, alongside Jack Nicholson, Cher and Susan Sarandon, propelled her to Hollywood’s A-list, with her Oscar-nominated roles in Dangerous Liaisons and The Fabulous Baker Boys swiftly following.

After her divorce from Horton, she enlisted a therapist to decipher her problems, while she embarked on a series of relationships, including one with her Batman Returns co-star Michael Keaton.

“Although I was okay with it at the time, I thought I may end up being one of those people who has a series of long-term relationships,” she reflects.

Did she ever think she might allow her career to consume her life?

“No,” she laughs. “I do think, though, when I got to be 34 and I hadn’t started a family, I decided that I wasn’t going to wait any longer. That was when I decided to adopt my daughter and then I met my husband two months later.”

In 1993, she completed the adoption of newborn Claudia Rose. She describes telling her husband-to-be, Ally McBeal creator David E Kelley, as a moment where she thought “this will separate the boys from the men“.

Pfeiffer and Kelley married at the end of the year, and their son, John Henry, was born in August 1994. At first, it was business as usual in terms of her acting, but Pfeiffer’s priorities then began to slowly switch as her family life began to dictate her path. After appearing in White Oleander in 2002, Pfeiffer vanished off screens for five years, seemingly taking a planned hiatus.

“I didn’t do it consciously,” she reflects with hindsight. “I think it was to do with the dynamics of what was happening in my life with my family. We were making a big move [to a ranch in northern California] and there was a lot consuming me and I also wasn’t reading anything that compelled me to make the sacrifice of going back to work. Then when things started to settle down, I realised: ‘Oh, how many years has it been since I worked?’”

So did she miss acting?

“I didn’t really miss anything until the last year of my hiatus,” she reflects. “I just missed working. I’m happiest when I’m productive and I’ve always worked, and I can’t imagine ever retiring. ”

The time out of the spotlight certainly helped lessen the impact of her public persona on her children’s upbringing, something Pfeiffer has always maintained a watchful eye on.

“I talk a lot about it with them,” says Pfeiffer of her children, now aged 14 and 16. “They’ve had to bear the brunt of my celebrity unwillingly, so they’ve been protected maybe more than a lot of kids with celebrity parents.”

Ultimately, she admits her children haven’t shown much interest in her profession. “It hasn’t been until recently that my films have been appropriate for them,” says Pfeiffer.

She’s referring to the two films that first marked her return from exile in 2007. The remake of John Waters’s spoof musical, Hairspray, in which she played the fascistic manager of a television station, and the offbeat fantasy Stardust, in which Pfeiffer excels as Lamia, a particularly evil witch who, ironically, desires eternal beauty.

Both roles proved Pfeiffer’s gameness in shedding her vanity to a degree that perhaps she wasn’t as free to do earlier in her career.

“I actually find it challenging and I sort of like it,” she says. “Thelma in Hairspray was really unattractive – just her soul – and in Stardust, I couldn’t have got any uglier than that! Does it get any uglier?”

Despite her undoubted grace in period productions, Pfeiffer plays bad girls with aplomb. You only have to recall her remarkable back-flipping, whip-cracking, leather-clad turn as Catwoman in Batman Returns.

“It’s kind of scary how delicious it gets to play evil,” she laughs. “As you get further into shooting you just get carried away, then they have to reel you hack. It’s really fun.”

With the recent Batman franchise revamp by Christopher Nolan meeting with her approval, Pfeiffer admits she would relish reprising the role of Carwoman. But could she play such a salacious character now?

“She could be an alley cat, where there’s a whole litter of them, so there’s like 10 Catwomen of varying ages. Wouldn’t that be funny!”

Unfortunately, not everybody in Hollywood shares her imagination though, with much truth in the perpetual complaint about the lack of roles for actresses past their 30s.

“I do think the amount of roles diminishes but I do think they get more interesting,” reasons Pfeiffer.

“With all the reality TV there’s not as many television parts, and with the state of the economy there are fewer films being made. I know actresses in their 30s who are yelling at their agents to get them parts.”

She reasons that it’s not necessarily sexism that is prominent in her industry, pointing out that all women share the same dilemmas, whatever their occupation. “I think it’s more because we live in an ageist society,” she says. “In all forms of business it’s difficult. When a 50-year-old man gets laid off, it’s pretty hard for him to find work at the same level. It’s just that in our business everything becomes high lighted and magnified because it’s written about as ‘Hollywood‘.”

Pfeiffer certainly enjoys keeping her distance. Living on a ranch in Northern California suits her fine. “I never really lived in Hollywood,” she muses. “It’s crowded and congested, and I like to have clean air and some space around me.”

Her “non-entertainment” community is protective of her family and the reality of her home life is “car pool and more car pool – driving the kids around” and her oil painting (“that’s what I do for myself“).

Possessing the family she thought she “might never have“, a “solid marriage” and work in an industry that continues to adore her, Pfeiffer admits she’s the happiest she’s ever been in her life. And one thing’s for sure, she’s certainly enjoying her 50s.

“By then you begin to realise how fortunate you are,” concludes Pfeiffer. “You’ve had a lot of people die and fall on bad times, but I have so much to be grateful for. ”

Scanned by Alya

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