|  Hollywood
and the critics certainly didn't do anything
like that about Sweet
Liberty. Some thought the film was
'strained' or 'flabby', others called it 'a
fresh, frisky charmer'. Sheila
Benson who was the chief film critic
for the Los Angeles Times,
Hollywood's 'local' paper, considered that only
'Caine and Pfeiffer still
emerge unmauled'. And Benson went on:
'Pfeiffer, who seemingly
never puts a foot the wrong way, is wonderful
as the actress voraciously consuming details
about her character.'
Another critic called Pfeiffer's work as 'comic
coup' as the 'Hollywood
actress who's all sunshine and cheekbones when
she needs to be, and tougher than the rest when
it comes to business.'
It was the ultimate evidence that if so far
Pfeiffer hadn't carried a major movie, she could
survive and actually flourish in one that was
not a box-office success. Her dual role as the
homely 1776 character and the tarty paranoid
playing the part was convincing proof of how
good she was and how marvellous she might be
with future material. Professionally, Pfeiffer
was really not surviving but soaring.
It didn't look as if Pfeiffer's marriage was
going to survive. Peter
Horton would later blame their separation,
in the summer of 1988, on their devotion to
their work rather than to their marriage. He
said they would look at each other, shake their
heads and think, 'We love
each other, so what's wrong?'
 This
bewildering situation went on for three years,
until they finally called it quits in the summer
of 1988. Pfeiffer's father Dick remembered driving
in a limousine with his wife Donna (who had
dubbed the teenaged Pfeiffer 'the
little drama queen') and his daughter
and Peter Horton
to the NBC TV studios in Burbank where Pfeiffer
was to make an appearance on American talkshow-king
Johnny Carson's
The Tonight Show.
Dick Pfeiffer said that throughout the drive
Horton was 'instructing'
his daughter what to say. 'After
she left him her career took off,' he
said.
Actually, it was taking off long before that.
Bruce McGill, the
'bridge' between the gap of television's Delta
House and Landis's Into
the Night, says Pfeiffer had changed
by the time she made that movie and added, 'For
the better! Without being a prima donna, she
had as much faith in her opinion of a scene
as anybody else's.'
 Kate
Guinzburg, the daughter of American stage
actress Rita Gam
who also appeared in films like Klute,
for which Jane Fonda
won that year's Best Actress Oscar, was the
production coordinator on Sweet
Liberty. Pfeiffer and Guinzburg hit
it off like bacon and eggs. After filming Pfeiffer
spent several weeks in New York staying at her
new friend's apartment in Manhattan.
Pfeiffer was beginning to find the friendship
of women important. She had grown up seeing
men – as in her father – as the
controllers of her life. And in her teenaged
years it was the guys, the surfers, with whom
she forged the strongest bonds. 'I
think that my relationships with women have
become more important the older I become,'
she said in the autumn of 1992. [Three
years earlier she and Guinzburg had formed their
own production company, Pfeiffer–Guinzberg
Productions.]
Pfeiffer was by then a powerful player in Hollywood.
But after Sweet
Liberty it would still be a year
before the breakthrough film and the establishment
of firm friendships with Cher
and the bountiful Susan
Sarandon. And the devilish Jack
'the Lad' Nicholson,
with whom Pfeiffer would be romantically linked,
although all she will admit to is an 'infatuation'. |
