 It
was Hooray for Hollywood time. There was
a snag. Richard
Donner decided to make his film,
a French myth that hit the mark, in Italy:
'We needed crumbling
castles and medieval ruins. And there
seemed to be more of them, in more suitable
condition, in Italy than anywhere else.'
Castles crumble, it seems, more dramatically
in Italy than in France.
Eventually, he settled on thirteen sites
of historical significance to be adapted
for Ladyhawke,
including an Etruscan bridge built in
600 Bc across the Fiora River (the oldest
span in western Europe) and Campo Imperatore.
Other locations involved castles that
were in the family of the late Italian
director Luchino
Visconti who was famous for among
other films The
Leopard and s Death
in Venice.
The locations were marvellous for Rutger
Hauer. And for Leo
McKern who as John
Mortimer's television Rumpole
enjoys his glass or eight of red wine
and as the defrocked priest Imperius
added a different twist to in vino veritas
('in wine, in truth'). For the golden
girl from Midway City, California, it
meant her first trip to Europe. And a
long separation from her husband. Pfeiffer
had long talks with Peter
Horton about it. Should she, shouldn't
she? She finally took the film, and the
production was based in Rome. The transatlantic
telephone bills were massive. 'Absence
does not make the heart grow fonder. I
don't know who said that but it's a lie,'
Pfeiffer would say on her return from
Italy.
 At
the time she went on: 'Marriage
takes a huge investment of time and devotion.
The more demanding your work is, the harder
it is to put in the kind of energy that
it takes. That's probably why so many
show business marriages don't work. You
have to cope with the problem of "I
have the time" versus "Well,
I don't". It's important to make
time for each other.'
As well as the emotional strains, Ladyhawke
was a tough physical film to make. But
she had never wavered from her regular
work out routine involving dancing, swimming,
running and regular games of racquetball
at the Santa Monica Sports Centre. 'I
had to fall off towers and work with wolves.
That was kind of fun, actually. but once
the wolves know you they can be so glad
to see you they might jump up and hurt
you accidentally.' What about the
twolegged wolves, specifically the Italian
mate. She didn't even get a pinched bottom.
'After the first
couple of weeks I started thinking: What's
wrong with me?' It could have only been
the cumbersome costumes.
She returned to California in the autumn
of 1983 feeling, as she would in the future
after location filming, like 'a
new woman'.
 'After
being away from the Hollywood environment
so long I came back with a different perspective.
I was a little more relaxed, I guess.
I started to take up oil painting again
it had been more than ten years and I
remembered my father saying to me, "A
real artist knows when to quit."
I realized that I don't know when to leave
painting alone. I'm that way with my acting
too, but it doesn't have to be perfect.'
But Pfeiffer
always appears to have wanted to accommodate
or make up for some imperfection in her
past. Some psychiatrists said it was the
guilt over the wasted years as the beach
girl. Others argued that it was the ongoing
need for approval, to please her father.
Talking to half a dozen of them you get
half a dozen half baked theories. If there's
a skeleton rattling in Pfeiffer's
mental closet, it's not eager to come
out of there.
 She
says she's dabbled in psychoanalysis (and
reveals that in another life she'd want
to be a psychiatrist), but on her return
from Europe she was more intent on working
on her marriage than her psyche. She decided
to get more involved with Horton's
career and that, in turn, meant more film
work for her. She became the executive
producer of a video production of Scott
Fitzgerald's short story Three
Hours Between Planes that Peter
Horton directed. The film attracted
Hollywood's Highgate Productions who offered
her husband a writing contract.
And that in turn led to Horton's
debut as a television director.
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