 
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.'
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