Pfeiffer's 'Fine Day' in the sun
Actress accentuates the positive in film and in life
By Stephen Schaefer
USA TODAY
 BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Michelle Pfeiffer doesn't have bells on her toes, but there's a happy spring in her step all the same.
Her positive outlook has nothing to do with how her movie One Fine Day, which opens Friday, fares during Hollywood's highly competitive Christmas sweepstakes.
One Fine Day presents Pfeiffer as Melanie Parker, a harried working single mom who meets a charming newspaper columnist ( ER heartthrob George Clooney) who's also divorced and a father. But Melanie is mighty wary of being burned again.
At 39, Pfeiffer has had an easier time. But it took years to climb from what she now calls "the dark side" to a place where her life works.
"Somewhere along the line I made the switch and was able to look at the bright side as opposed to the dark side all the time," Pfeiffer says as she neatly ( twists her angular frame along a stuffed sofa in a hotel suite. Sleek and chic in a black Armani pantsuit and a striped top, she wears little makeup and no jewelry other than her wedding and engagement rings.
"Now I look at everything I have and think how lucky I am."
That's because melancholy was her preferred state until she realized, "The romance of the kind of torture and angst is not working anymore. It's not romantic at all.
"It's just painful," she adds, laughing lightly.
"I just made a decision I wanted to be a happy person. It was just looking for the light.
"Getting to that place is another thing; that doesn't just happen. It's not just deciding," she says, snapping her fingers. "I think a lot of it is just maturing, and I realized one of the things I was most unhappy about was that I didn't have my own family.
"That prompted me to start adoption proceedings," she says, referring to her daughter, Claudia, whom Pfeiffer brought home as a single mother in March 1993.
"After that I found David and my family just — boom! — there it was."
Pfeiffer married TV producer David E. Kelley in November 1993, and their son, John, was born the next August.
"Everybody said, 'You have to have children!' and 'How amazing kids are!' and when anybody hypes anything like that, in my life it always falls short. So I sort of expected, `Maybe ...' And it's just more than I could have hoped for; it keeps getting better and better."
In real life, Pfeiffer is as controlling as Melanie when it comes to sharing family time with work. Her contracts now specify she'll spend only three weeks total on location.
"My kids are always with me, but it's splitting the family," she explains. "It's like taking the kids away from David. So I can probably last four weeks, but that's as much as I can go."
When she talks about Kelley, it's with unabashed devotion.
Although she played the small title role in his fall release To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, they are one showbiz couple happy to have separate careers.
"It just makes it so much easier," she says. "Both of us have the same kind of balance in terms of what our priorities are concerning work vs. family. Both of us are very strong on family.
"We're willing to make sacrifices in our careers for our family. If he wasn't one to do that, it wouldn't work for me, and if I wasn't willing to do that, it wouldn't work for him. We're just really compatible."
Pfeiffer's contentment may come from her home, but she's not doing bad on the big screen, either.
1995's Dangerous Minds, which she produced, spawned Coolio's monster rap track Gangsta's Paradise and gave her a sleeper smash. Last spring, Up Close & Personal with Robert Redford was also a hit and spawned Celine Dion's Because You Loved Me.
Her company, Via Rosa, produced both One Fine Day and her next picture, A Thousand Acres (a co-production with co-star Jessica Lange's company). Via Rosa also has the rights to the best seller The Deep End of the Ocean.
She plays both producer and star, but Pfeiffer is the first to emphasize: "I'm not involved on a daily basis. If there's a crisis, I don't want to know about that. I'm mainly involved on a creative level."
But being head of your own production company "really is a double-edged sword. With those same opportunities comes an added stress. On one hand, it relieves my stress because I have a place that's structured, that makes it easier to develop projects.
"At the same time it adds to my workload as well. Yet when I weigh the two, it seems I come out ahead."
With a break in her work schedule, she's considering one of literature's most tragic mothers, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, as a movie that would be directed by One Fine Day's Michael Hoffman.
"At first, when Michael gave me the script, I wouldn't read it because I thought it would be three months in Russia. But he's promised me he could get me in and out of Russia in three weeks," Pfeiffer says. "That's my deal!"
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One Fine Day (**1/2) is two formulaic hours, but they do illustrate how two attractive leads and a lickety-split narrative can elevate meager material into something this side of bearability. 
