Tough Guise
She may be Hollywood's
hottest, but Michelle Pfeiffer is
decidedly cool about stardom. She'd
rather play any part than be herself,
finds Van Meter. Photographed by
Herb Ritts
The honest-to-God
truth," says Michelle
Pfeiffer, "is
that this is a way for me to try
to tolerate doing publicity. Period.
It's like, all right, I'm an actress.
How can I begin to enjoy this process?
Because obviously it's a huge one,
and it's not going away. So on my
way to the shoot, I said, All right
you bitch, you'd better have fun.
You set this whole thing up your
way, and this is it, so don't complain."
Pfeiffer
has just spent three days being
photographed as six wildly different
characters who could not be further
from her own. At the end of the
three days she puts on a dress and
prepares to be photographed as Michelle
Pfeiffer. She looks in the
mirror. "You
are just so boring,"
she complains, remembering the reason
for all the effort with period costumes
and makeup in the first place: she
doesn't like the way she looks.
"This
is really fascinating,"
she says later, as if talking to
herself. "You
find yourself a lot more interesting
in the form of another character."
In every interview with Pfeiffer,
the overblown cliches are eventually
hauled out: Michelle
Pfeiffer, the civilian, is
a beautiful, if bland, California
every-girl. Wow, they will say,
this captivating woman on the screen
is really plain in person. But it
sounds like a cliche because it's
true. She is plain. She works at
it, as if plain were more interesting
than pretty. Which is why when confronted
with unanswerable, no-win questions
about her looks, she freaks our
just a little bit. She seems to
anticipate the disappointment people
will feel when they meet her, so
she beats them to it, slags herself,
and winds up sounding just a little
bit ridiculous.
Hence these pictures. An experiment.
All her idea, really. This is the
way Michelle
Pfeiffer wants to be seen.
She is comfortable (and less boring)
hiding behind other guises - all
covered up to look like someone
who has more character in her face,
her dress, someone who doesn't look
like her. "I
asked a lot of people,"
she says. "I
had lists and lists compiled, and
I did a lot of reading, and it kind
of all boiled down to these characters"
- Lulu
from Pandora's
Box, Laurence
from Private
Lives, Maggie
from Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof, Eliza
Doolittle from Pygmalion,
Kate
from The
Taming of the Shrew, and
Joan of Arc.
She refuses to explain the thinking
behind the choices, except to say
that it was nothing terribly intellectual.
She wants to preserve whatever "mystery"
may be left.
Michelle
Pfeiffer has admitted that
she "kind
of learned how to act on-screen."
In spite of that (or perhaps in
light of it), critics love her.
Always have. She is, in various
reviews, "a cover girl with
the inverted-searchlight soul of
a Woody Allen heroine" or an
actor with "a sense of comedy
... along with something both haunting
and heartbreaking." In dude
after dud, said one critic of her
early screen career, "she
has never been less than bewitching."
Lately, however, the pickings have
gotten better; she's had five consecutive
critical, if not commercial, hits:
The
Witches of Eastwick, Married
to the Mob, Tequila
Sunrise, Dangerous
Liaisons, and The
Fabulous Baker Boys (followed
by an ambitious mistake, The
Russia House). Of her Oscar-nominated
performance in Dangerous
Liaisons, one critic wrote
that she "hits
just the right note of bold yet
frightened emotion, modesty, and
pain. She works that old white magic
as superbly as the stars of Hollywood's
golden age," which pretty
much nails it.
Pfeiffer
seems to have bubbled up from the
past. While thoroughly nineties
women such as Annette
Bening, Julia
Roberts, Demi
Moore, and Kathleen
Turner seem to act themselves,
Pfeiffer's
characters, as she has said, become
her. It's a bold thing to say, but
a distinction that somehow seems
right. "I
don't like talking about the characters
I do in film, ever,"
she says. "There's
no deep, dark meaning. It's just
an idea. It's just an idea."
This month two new characters will
become Michelle
Pfeiffer. In Jonathan
Kaplan's Love
Field, she plays a sassy,
bottle-blond Dallas housewife who
is obsessed with Jacqueline
Kennedy. On a bus trip from
Washington, D.C., to Dallas on the
weekend following the JFK
assassination, she meets a black
man and his daughter. "Just
because there's a black actor and
I'm white," Pfeiffer
says, "they're
calling it an interracial love story
- which I guess is a big theme these
days. But hopefully it's about more
than that." She is also
costarring with Al
Pacino in Frankie
and Johnny (directed by Garry
Marshall) in the role Kathy
Bates originated off-Broadway
in the Terrence
McNally play (titled Frankie
and Johnny in the Clair de Lune).
Pfeiffer
is the lonely, wounded waitress
in a greasy spoon; Pacino,
the cook in a story that is essentially
a tug-of-war about intimacy between
two doggedly ordinary working-class
nobodies. Says Pfeiffer,
"I'm
so happy with it." Then
whispering, "I
never say that. You will probably
never hear me say that again in
my lifetime."
Admitting for the first time in
her career that she likes one of
her own movies may be a signal that
Pfeiffer
- a woman who has professed that
her "basic
nature is dark" and
that she dresses to "hide"
- is finally becoming a bit more
comfortable with herself. And if
not, then she's landed the perfect
role: Catwoman
in Tim Burton's
Batman
sequel. She actually gets to wear
a mask.
|
Spain.
