Twenty-five

What was another of the most remarkable aspects of the blossoming of Michelle Pfeiffer from beach girl to box-office beauty was her quiet acceptance of stardom. Yes, she was nervy at first with Pacino, but with him and other actors she was never so in awe of them that she was intimidated. That self-assurance was in full play by the time the cast of Sweet Liberty arrived in the Hamptons on Long Island on the American East Coast. Filming was to go on around Sag Harbour.

Michael Caine recalled being tempted to appear in the film by Alda:

"Alan is marvellous, but he worried me a bit when he offered me the part. He said, written the role especially for you.' So I asked him what it was. 'A conceited old film star — and you'll be perfect.' I said to Alan, 'Thanks very much, where are you shooting?' and Alan says, 'In the Hamptons, all summer. And we'll get you a beach house.' So I said yes. Wouldn't you?"

Pfeiffer was also an easy 'yes'. She liked the script. She liked her co-stars. She had confidence in Marty Bergman. And while the Hamptons in the summer are where thousands of people pay great amounts of money to be, her situation was completely the reverse.

Alan Alda's film is about a small-town college professor who wins a Pulitzer Prize and a place on the bestseller lists with a book about the American Revolution. He's spent ten years on the project, on this heavy historical work, and then Hollywood arrives to film it. They try to turn it into a youth comedy. Alda plays the author, Professor Michael Burgess, who is sent crazy by the film people. And Alda, who is more than familiar with the vagaries of the Hollywood dream factory, explained, 'Burgess has penned an intelligent, lusty work, but when they start shooting the director leaves out the intelligence and dwells heavily on the lust.' The fictional film maker's thinking is that to appeal to the youth market there must be young men who defy authority and young women who are ever so easily inclined to take their clothes off, sort of Rebel Without a Clue or Up the American Revolution!

Alda admits to wearing a wry smile and having huge amounts of fun allowing his Hollywood types to run riot around history and to play havoc with Burgess's book. In the story, Michael Caine's womanizing actor plays Colonel Tarleton of the British Army, a soldier from the Green Dragoons so called as the regiment wore green uniforms. The film people make the uniforms red. They are easier to see. But then won't they be confused with the Redcoats? Quibble, quibble, quibble.

Pfeiffer, as actress Faith Healy, plays real-life patriot Mary Slocomb who fought off the Green Dragoons. In the film within the film she doesn't even fight off Colonel Tarleton. She goes to bed with him. Alda's Burgess is bereft. But his concerns are quickly forgotten when he becomes smitten by Healy/Slocomb. After a decade of writing about his revolutionary heroine he forgets he's not meeting her but the actress playing her. When he decides to put things on a more intimate level he goes to her room. And then he's a little shocked to see Healy, cigarette in one hand, telephone in the other, shouting obscene instructions to her agent. Burgess exclaims, 'Why, you're two different people.'

And Pfeiffer gets the best line in the movie: 'If I could only be two people I'd be out of business.'

"I was clear she was going to be a major star,' said Bob Hoskins who plays nervy screenwriter Stanley Gould.

Caine's character, leading man and leading lecher Elliot James ('a lunatic who gets away with everything' was Caine's description), is not something he, Hoskins or Alda could relate to in 1985. Their 'wandering' days were over, but Alda laughed about his sex scenes with Pfeiffer: 'I loved those scenes in bed. You get to... lie down while you work.'