Article: Pfeiffer - 'Ladyhawke' filming set

Michelle Pfeiffer

PUSHING FOR PERFECTION

The former Miss Orange County is fighting for—and finally winning—movie roles that show off her acting talent as well as her beauty-queen looks!

By Kirk Honeycutt

"You can't get around how you look in this business," says Michelle Pfeiffer. "l've tried, believe me. I've actually auditioned for more serious, meaty roles with painted circles under my eyes and dirty hair, but your last picture is how people in the industry view you."

Michelle, demure and soft-spoken, with pale skin and short blond hair, has had more than her share of "fluffy" roles. She's played, among others, The Bombshell—that was the character's only narre—in the short-lived TV series "Delta House," a carhop with dreams of screen stardom in "The Hollywood Knights," and the head of the punkish Pink Ladies in Grease 2. None of those roles prepared audiences for her superb, sad-funny performance as Al Pacino's junkie wife in Scarface.

Success has spoiled many a performer, but Michelle will be happy if it simply eases her obsessive behavior toward acting. "I have a problem with perfectionism. Every time I finish a role, I always feel I could have done it better. If I'm not beating myself up, I feel insecure. It's hard for me to explain, because I'm still trying to figure me out."

The five months she spent in Italy last year, filming a medieval romantic fantasy called Ladyhawke, costarring Matthew Broderick and Rutger Hauer, provided some unexpected therapy. "After being away from the Hollywood environment so long, I came back with a different perspective. I'm a little bit more relaxed, I guess. I just started to take up oil painting again—it's been more than ten years—and I remember my father saying to me, 'A real artist knows when to quit.' I've realized that I don't quite know when to leave a painting alone. I'm that way with my acting, too, but it doesn't have to be so perfect."

Michelle grew up in conservative Orange County, California. She dreamed of becoming an actress but had no idea how to go about it until a friend suggested she enter a local beauty contest. Horrified by the idea, Michelle speedily revised her attitude when she learned that one of the judges was an agent. Sure enough, she not only became Miss Orange County but was also signed by the agent.

In Hollywood, Michelle found herself "getting real lost" with drugs and alcohol, until she met some people who promised to teach her a healthy, vegetarian life-style. "I thought, 'Great, I'll go see what it's all about.' "

They started her on a twelve-day water fact. For the next two years she endured a regimen of strict vegetarianism, physical conditioning, and mind control—"real brainwashing." Without realizing it, she was in the clutches of a cult. During her last six months, she wanted to leave, but the leaders convinced her she wasn't ready to cope with life alone.

Michelle met her future husband, Peter Horton, in an acting class, just as he was cast in Split Image, a movie about cults. "I went with him to San Francisco, where he researched cults, and I realized that what the deprogrammers described was exactly the experience I was in."

She immediately left the cult. Michelle still maintains a vegetarian diet—"but I also eat ice cream and junk food."

Married for nearly three years now, Michelle and Peter live in a Spanish-style house near the beach in Santa Monica. Their worst problem, she says, is enduring the prolonged separations. Her five months in Rome produced colossal phone bilis. "Absence does not make the heart grow fonder. I don't know who raid that, but it's a lie.

"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."

Ladyhawke, the movie that kept Michelle and Peter apart for five months, takes place in twelfth-century Europe. Michelle plays a princess who is suffering under the curse of an evil bishop: She is a hawk during the day and a woman after dark. The role was arduous, but her regular workout routine—dancing, swimming, running, and racketball—paid off in strength and endurance.

"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."

Friends had warned Michelle about another kind of wolf—the Italian male—but she never encountered so much as pinched bottom. "After the first couple of weeks, I started thinking, 'What's wrong with me?' "

Nothing, Michelle!