Twelve
Never to Date an actor - No quedes nunca con un actor

Michelle Pfeiffer thought for a long time about agreeing to marriage, pointing, out, 'I broke one of my own Ten Commandments never to date an actor, especially one you study with. Then, I married one!' She was a young wife. She was in love with love. 'Peter drew me back into the world. I was terrified my feelings for him would leave because they were so wonderful.'

Peter Horton had a much more worldly upbringing than his wife. He was born in Bellevue, Washington state, but he was just ten years old when his father's shipping business moved the family across the Pacific to Hong Kong. They came back to America in his high school years.

'She's a remarkable woman. She's just one of those people who come along in life every once in a while,' says Horton who encouraged his wife to go out for more and more roles. It, combined with their career drive, is what' would later lead to difficulties. It wasn't so much that they would fall out of love as out of synch.

At first, as lovers, and then husband and wife they got immersed in similar projects. They were young. And hopeful. Both had CVs in folders with 8 by 10 glossy pictures, which they kept in the office of their Spanish-style stucco house in Santa Monica, close to the beach and the Pacific Ocean. She was the one who built a deck in the back garden. She liked manual labour, setting herself tasks and goals. It was that work ethic, like stacking stone-washed jeans out in the middle of the night at the supermarket.

And Pfeiffer kept working hard at acting class, and John LaRocca pursued work for her with equal enthusiasm. In 1981 he landed her roles in three television films. In Callie and Son, which starred Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman) in the title role, Pfeiffer played a woman an haunted by a suspicious past who marries into a rich publishing family. In The Children Nobody Wanted she played the girlfriend of a man who adopted a series of abandoned children.

In Splendor in the Grass, a TV remake of Elia Kazan's landmark film, which starred the late Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, she played Ginny, described in the programme notes as 'a hyperactive flapper'

But then all Pfeiffer wanted was 'good' work. She took the role of a feminist student in, a small Los Angeles production of Playground in the Fall. She replaced another actress at the last minute, appeared in only one scene and got no reviews. But she recalls, 'I was told my instincts were good.'