'Turning 50? It's better than the alternative'

In Stardust, Michelle Pfeiffer plays a witch who craves the beauty of youth. It couldn't be further from the truth, she tells Harriet Lane

Michelle Pfeiffer didn't plan to take a four-year sabbatical. It just sort of happened. "Honest to God, I got busy." With what? "Life," she says. Throughout her 20s and into her 30s, she says she fell apart between projects, and downtime filled her with horror. "My dad used to say, 'An idle mind is the devil's playground,' and I was certainly a more balanced person when I was working. Acting's an odd profession for a young person; it's so extreme. You work, and the conditions are tough and the process is so immersive, and then it stops, and then there's nothing. So you have to find ways of making you feel productive when you're not actually producing anything. For a young person, that's really challenging."

But now, she says, her off-duty life is full to bursting with family and domesticity. "I feel I have to go back to work to get some rest, because I find real life so exhausting. Incredibly fulfilling - but just so exhausting," she says. For the first time in her life, she says, she has interests: she paints a bit, "and the other day we were driving in the car and I said to David [E Kelley, her husband], 'You know, I kind of wish that I had become a scientist.'" She mimes an incredulous sideways glance. "But, you know, the science section is my favourite bit of the New York Times. I get so excited on Tuesdays when it comes out."

In 2002, Pfeiffer and Kelley, the writer/producer behind LA Law, Chicago Hope and Ally McBeal, moved with their two children, now teenagers, to a ranch in northern California. But Pfeiffer wasn't simply moving away from Los Angeles, which she describes as "too darn crowded, with too much traffic, and the paparazzi have lost their minds, so I don't want to be there"; she was also in the process of detaching from the movie industry. Having built a career on a killer combination of nervy froideur and sultriness - qualities that left scorchmarks on Scarface, Dangerous Liaisons, The Fabulous Baker Boys and Batman Returns - she changed pace and direction. Her children were pre-schoolers, and she showed up in a few movies a year, mostly overwrought hankie-flutterers such as I Am Sam, The Deep End of the Ocean and The Story of Us.

As her children grew, her output dwindled. After White Oleander in 2002, she lost her appetite for work altogether. "I wasn't reading anything that I wanted to commit to. But it's hard to know if I was being dismissive because maybe, subconsciously, I was ready to take a break. I'm always inclined to talk myself out of work, though," she adds, shrugging. "It's a strange thing that I do. I get cold feet. I overthink."

In the past, this caution has led to some eccentric, even clumsy career choices. Pre-kids, Pfeiffer turned down Basic Instinct, The Silence of the Lambs, Sleepless in Seattle and Thelma & Louise; and yet despite this talent for self-sabotage, and despite embarrassments such as Up Close and Personal and Dangerous Minds, she remained - and still remains - a cast-iron movie star in the grand style: a creature with unearthly looks and lashings of old-fashioned screen magnetism, qualities that have sometimes drowned out her considerable talents as an actress.

There's a caution, too, in the roles that have tempted her back into the industry: bumper-sized cameos in ensemble pieces, such as icy racist Velma von Tussle, the darkest note in last summer's sunny remake of Hairspray. Next up, she is easily the best thing in the vast cast of Stardust, an epic fantasy in the tradition of The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story. It's an orgy of highly-coloured spectacle: fallen stars, ghost princes, poisoned chalices, plumed horses, enchanted forests, voodoo dolls, sky pirates, gypsy caravans, Victorian corsetry and unicorns. Fortunately, Pfeiffer pitches it just right - lots of welly - as Lamia, a 5,000-year-old witch hellbent on recapturing her vanished youth and beauty. For much of the movie she has a complexion like a crocodile handbag and a matted hairdo, but in one thrilling sequence, she drops several millennia in the blink of an eye and, examining her restored glamourpuss reflection in a mirror, smoulders with triumph and satisfaction.

But hey, it's a provocative role for a 49-year-old former beauty queen to pick, isn't it? Perched on a sofa in Claridges, Pfeiffer - gauzy grey Vena Cava minidress, Prada cardie, fetish platforms - winces a bit, and says that although Lamia was a great character, she was definitely "not in my comfort zone". When she met Matthew Vaughn, aka Mr Claudia Schiffer, he explained that he wanted "to do a social commentary on, you know, our obsession with youth and perfection and beauty, and what he saw as the extremes that women go to in order to obtain that, to retain it. Well, when he explained that, I thought, 'Ooh, that's kind of risky. Now, all I'm going to be asked about is ageing.' I knew what I was taking on but it's not really a subject matter you want to spend a lot of time talking about - or thinking about, frankly."

This sounds a bit ice-queeny, but in fact she's fairly open, unprickly on the subject. "Well, it's that number, you know," she says, of her next birthday. "A big one! Still, it's better than the alternative, right?"

Though she says she toys with the idea of surgery, she has apparently held off this far (if she has had work, it's brilliant. Her face has none of the "stuck" look associated with lifts, fillers and Botox). She runs six miles a day, eats the usual ghastly diet - avoiding wheat, dairy and sugar - and claims to have made her peace with the inevitable. "There's a hump you get over once you accept that your face will show signs of ageing, and will continue to show signs of ageing," she says. "Those first initial signs are the most upsetting. But yes, I'm over the hump, and I move further away from it every year."

Having said that, she says skincare ads turn her brain to mush. "I see commercials and they're very convincing. 'Oh, I'd better get that cream, I'm going to really regret it if I don't.' I have so many products, I'm not kidding you, and you have to be a chemist to figure out how to use them, and anyway, they all give me a rash. So I certainly feel the pressure that women feel and at times, it's a struggle. But the older I get, the less of an issue it becomes. The people you love get seriously ill, the people you love die ... You see people struggling with real issues and that puts things into perspective."

The daughter of an air-conditioning salesman, Pfeiffer grew up something of a handful in Midway City, California, where she messed around with truancy, drink and drugs. After winning the Miss Orange County beauty pageant in 1978, she inched her way into showbusiness with roles in CHiPs and Fantasy Island. Her first lead role in 1982's Grease 2 (a stinker, but the New York Times commented on her on-screen ease and insouciance) led to Brian De Palma's Scarface, where she was transfixing as Al Pacino's junkie wife.

When asked to pick her favourite performance, she uneasily adjusts her position on the sofa. "Well ... I don't think I can." The only time she watches her films is right after they're finished, and all she can see at that point are her mistakes. "I'm probably too close to be objective." This discomfort stays with her for years, which means that when a film comes on television years later, she can't change channels quickly enough. She does a comic little self-parody for me: frantic, jabbing madly at the remote. But she's starting to realise that maybe she's not being fair to herself. "Recently, we were channel-surfing, and Married to the Mob was on, and I, of course, hated my performance in the movie. But my kids had never seen it, and so I let it play for a little bit. And I'm watching it, and I'm thinking, 'You know, I'm actually not that bad in this! Actually, I'm kind of funny!' And so who knows how I'll feel, if I let that much time go by before I revisit all those movies."

Pfeiffer has always struggled with perspective, it seems. Her tendency to agonise and to doubt still clouds her enjoyment of her career, but the insecurity is no longer as crippling as it once was. "I've learned to live with it, just as I've learned to live with a few wrinkles. I'm just not that objective about my own work. Inevitably, I like a performance that nobody else does, and the performances that other people like I think stink. So I've learned not to trust my own instincts."

Children, and the realisation that she badly wanted them, shook her out of the spiral of self-absorption. Her daughter was adopted in 1993, just as she and Kelley were getting together (their son was born a year later). "By then I had started to find ways to balance myself out a bit. I'm glad I waited. In fact, that was why I made a conscious decision to start a family. I knew I was ready. I wanted something else to focus on. Work wasn't doing it all for me any more."

She's still hard on herself, but parenthood "has pulled my focus. I just can't worry about myself so much. I'm a much more balanced person in that way now - more forgiving." But she still requires delicate handling. "See, this is still a problem. Directors have to be very careful with me. On Stardust, because of the special effects and the location work, we had a fair amount of dubbing. But when I get on the [recording] stage, I begin to want to change everything. And Matthew was lovely because he really humoured me. Of course, he didn't really use any of my suggestions, but he let me go through the process while he just nodded and went, 'Mmm, OK, I'll look at that.' That's what I need! But at least I can laugh at myself now," she adds, proudly. "I couldn't do that before."