The Witch is Black

MICHELLE PFEIFFER
takes a dive into
The Deep End of the Ocean

THE MOMENT. MOST ACTORS CAN REMEMBER THE MOMENT THEY THOUGHT THEY could do this acting thing. For Michelle Pfeiffer, the moment happened in high school. It changed her life forever.

It was during acting class and Pfeiffer had just finished a skit when her acting teacher came up to her and said: "I think you have some talent."

"That was it," Pfeiffer says. "I never forgot it. Then, when I was about 19, I was trying to figure out what I can do. The seed had been planted and I thought, I guess I can act, she told me I could. I don't know if she hadn't said that to me if I would have become an actress."

Of course, it didn't happen overnight that the actress Pfeiffer thought she could be actually came into being. First there was the big victory in the Miss Orange County beauty contest and then the loss in the Miss Los Angeles competition. Although she says she entered the first beauty contest on a whim, that whim paid dividends in landing her an agent.

She followed up her toothy smiles and banner-wearing days with some TV commercials and a regular gig as the bimbo named The Bombshell on TV's Delta House - a show that tried to capitalize on the huge success of Animal House but that tanked after only three months on the air.

The Delta House debacle was in 1979. Pfeiffer made her film debut the following year in Falling in Love Again. Remember that film - Don't worry, no one else does either.

It would be seven more years before the would-be beauty queen, born April 29, 1957, in Santa Ana, California, could really say she'd arrived. The film that announced her arrival was The Witches of Eastwick. During those seven long years she honed her craft, bided her time and kept coming back for more.

"I wouldn't go away," she says. "I'd lick my wounds and come back for more. I think people either have IT or they don't. I have yet to meet someone in this business who doesn't have IT, which is the ability to pick yourself up by your bootstraps, dust yourself off and move forward."

Of course, it's easier to dust yourself off when you're bringing home decent pay cheques for appearing in such less-than-stellar films as Hollywood Knights and Grease 2. Those early roles lead to Brian DePalma casting Pfeiffer as AI Pacino's strung out wife in Scarface.

It was still The Witches of Eastwick that really put Pfeiffer on the map. That film was A-List all the way with costars Susan Sarandon, Jack Nicholson and Cher.

But it was also around this time that personal problems intervened in her ascension. Married to actor/director Peter Horton (thirtysomething) since 1982, the two would split in 1988, a year after Witches - and a very busy year for Pfeiffer. That year she appeared in Tequila Sunrise with Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell, Dangerous Liaisons with John Malkovich (with whom she had a brief affair) and Married to the Mob.

Still, the work couldn't hide the fact that there was something missing in her life - children. There was talk of having a child with her actor boyfriend Fisher Stevens, who was caught cheating on Pfeiffer shortly after the couple announced they had thoughts of parenting together.

Then came David E. Kelly, the workaholic wunderkind who created such TV fare as Alley McBeal and Chicago Hope. Pfeiffer had already decided to adopt a child on her own before Kelly entered her life. Friends set them up on a bowling date and they hit it off right away. They have been together ever since, including through Pfeiffer's 1993 adoption of her daughter Claudia.

In August of the following year, the couple added another child to their life when son John Henry was born.

Since then, the high-profile duo have become notorious cocooners. "We stay home all the time," says Pfeiffer. "We're the most boring couple in Hollywood because we're such homebodies."

In fact, she's such a homebody that she's recently joined Sean Penn in saying that she's going to give up acting. Penn says he's going to do it because he'd prefer to direct. But for Pfeiffer, it's a matter of family.

She was already well known in the industry as someone who refuses jobs that will take her away from her family for too long. "I think I'm getting a reputation," she says, "because I've had to become kind of a hardass about it. You can work me like a dog, but I won't allow you to make my children suffer by depriving them of me."

And now she has gone on record as stating she might give up acting entirely.

"A lot of it is getting older," she says about her decision, "a lot of it is therapy and a lot of it is my family. Having children has opened me up. You tend to shift your priorities."

Perhaps the close-knit family thing is her way of atoning for past transgressions, as she says, "I was the oldest of three daughters and I helped raise my sisters, so I considered them a burden. I was pretty mean to them. But we're very close today. I'm also very close to my brother and my parents now, too."

Speaking of family, it was Pfeiffer's father who left her with another one of those clear moments that, while not about acting, has certainly guided her through her long and rewarding career. "My father would say, 'trust everyone, but cut the cards. ' "

Article taken out from Tribute Magazine (Canada) February , 1999
Transcripted by Michelle Pfeiffer, The Face