She hates talking about her beauty: “at the risk of sounding like a jerk, part of me doesn’t feel like I am really beautiful, and part of me is afraid to be beautiful, because there are repercussions. When I first started acting, I got a lot of roles because of the way I looked; I’m the first to admit that. But when you want to move into larger roles, it can be a barrier. I remember downplaying it very much, going in for interviews. Indeed, there were times when she was rejected for a part because she was “too pretty.”

She think on herself that is is so disgustingly serious: “Maybe I’m getting better… I just wish sometimes I could be more like Michael Caine, you know–I wish that I could not take it all so seriously, have more fun with it. If I do a movie I don’t’ like, I don’t want to get so upset with myself ”

Michelle usually hides, in the interest of privacy, under a floppy hat, behind sunglasses and in T-shirt and jeans, she certainly makes no effort to look like a movie goddess.

Neither she doesn’t like talk about her private life, she hates interviews: “I am basically very private, and I’m really nervous about doing publicity. Every time I set up an interview, I say, ‘That’s it, this is my last one. I’ll do this because I committed to doing it, but I’m never doing another one.’ It was insane”

Michelle is well known for turning down some pictures that became huge successes:
“When I first went into the business, someone told met hat being able to turn down a part was the only thing that would ever give me power“.
“I have turned down pictures and afterward regretted it but also turned down some that became huge successes, and when I’ve gone to see them I’ve though, I know this is a huge success and that it would be really great if I were in a big, successful movie, but I don’t get it and I don’t like it. So I’m glad I’m not in it. I never wanted to have to take a job because I didn’t have any money“.

She was little feminine in her infancy: “When I was very young I never thought I was attractive, because I was a tomboy and I was always the biggest girl in the class”

She was known by a variety of nicknames. “Michelle Mudturtle” is the only one she chooses to share. “I was a rotten kid, just rotten. I was always in trouble. I tried so hard to be good, but I was incapable. just incapable. With the greatest of effort, I would manage to get a C in citizenship. I was a bully.”

She skipped classes at Fountain Valley High School (where she maintained a solid B average) to hang out at nearby Huntington Beach with the surfers and lifeguards.

She went to work at 14, lying about her age to land a job selling jeans at a clothing store: “I’ve been working since I was 14, and my father, being very conservative, has always been strict about my having a savings account.”

Her firstest relationsihps were with Danny Jackson, a football player, and then with Mickey Swenson, a handsome, funny athlete, placed her squarely in cool territory.

She totaled her first car, a red ‘65 Mustang, at 16

When Pfeiffer found out she cold get English credits by taking theater courses, she jumped at the chance. “I’d always thought that theater people were really weird, and I got into this class, and I just fell in love with the people there. They were funny, witty; they were really interesting. It was the only class that I made an effort to go to.”

After graduation Pfeiffer spent a “boring year” studying to be a court reporter and then dropped out.

She worked as a checkout girl at a local supermarket and hated it. It’s easy to picture her there, sullen and resentful, snapping her gum and seething. In fact, it marked a fateful turning point.

One day when some lady was “bitching about her cantaloupes,” as she recalls it, she had an epiphany. Standing there in her nursing shoes and her little red smock, she asked herself what, if she could do anything in the world, she would actually want to do. The answer came up acting.

She became Miss Orange County in 1978. “I won Miss Orange County, and then I went to the Miss L.A. contest, which I didn’t win. I was very pleased, actually. I didn’t want to win and be opening drugstores. The reason I went was that I wanted to meet one of the judges, who was a commercial agent. He became my first agent in Los Angeles.”

Her agent got for her the first work as actress, a line on Fantasy Island, “I’ll never forget it. ‘Who is he, Naomi?’ I practiced and practiced that line. I remember being so discombobulated, because I had to find my mark-you know, you don’t learn that in acting class. And the lights were so bright I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I remember showing up for work and having my name on the dressing room.”

In 1979, at 20, she won her first series role, a jiggly undergrad named the Bombshell on Delta House, ABC’s short-lived rip-off of Animal House.

Michelle paid her show-biz dues with bimbo parts-a shot on the television series, she would call her agent, crying, “They’re putting me in hot pants again.”

She consumed drugs during her teenager years: “I quit smoking, drinking and taking drugs and went on long fasts. I never saw anybody. Then I met Peter (Horton). Peter drew me back into the world. I was terrified my feelings for him would leave because they were so wonderful, but they didn’t”

While an acting student in L.A., Pfeiffer joined a vegetarian cult that she later claimed “brainwashed” her. According to her, she was rescued, by Peter Horton

She was 22 when she was married to Peter Horton, a performance classmate, in 1981

Michelle fired her agent, who was left with only his memories of Pfeiffer and an autographed picture: “To John, who has taken me from crayons to perfume. Thank you for your hard work, never-ending faith & love. I love you, Michelle.” And she signed with Gary Lucchesi and Alan Iezman at William Morris, and they promptly got her big audition: Grease 2 (1982)

Michelle auditioned, along with hundreds of other girls, for the role of Pink Lady Stephanie Zinone in Grease 2 (1982), she got the part for her ability for dancing and singing: “I didn’t make myself crazy because It seemed so farfetched that I’d get the part. My agent said, ‘It’s a real cattle call, but it will be good for you to go for the experience.”‘ After singing a couple of Linda Ronstadt numbers, Pfeiffer was asked to read for Pat Birch. “That was really weird for me. I’d been taking singing lessons and I had taken dance, because I loved to dance, but I had never considered myself a professional at all. I went on this audition as a fluke, and somehow, through the process of going back and dancing, and then going back and singing, I ended up getting the part. I went crazy with that movie“.

On their honeymoon the big news came that she had gotten the part of tough-girl Stephanie Zinone in Grease 2

Ed Limato, who is now Vice-chairman of ICM, met Pfeiffer when he was at William Morris and another agent brought her in to see him while he was on the phone. Within a week, the casting director for Scarface (1983) told him she was looking for a young actress to play Al Pacino’s cokehead gangster moll, Elvira. Limato said, “‘I’ve just met this fantastic girl who’s perfect for this,’ I wasn’t even her agent, but I was really knocked out by her, so much so that I was selling this woman I didn’t even know for this role. There’s always been something different about Michelle.”

After Scarface, she needed a change in the kind of roles. “I got offered every bitch that has ever been.” Instead, she took Ladyhawke (1984).

Michelle got Isabeau´s feature in Ladyhawke (1984) because she prepared and did the casting to get the role with very enthusiasm. Donner commented: “I had seen to Michelle in Grease 2 and I thought she was a very good actress and a very beautiful girl but I didn´t believe she was the best candidate for the film. However, the casting director sent to us a video-tape from Michelle´s proof. She wore a wig and did a scene from the film that she had invented, the video finished with a image of a flock of birds with her voice saying ‘This is the impresion I have taken from Ladyhawke’. We enjoyed so much and we thought it was admirable that she dared to do something completely creative and by her own. So, we decided to take a risk and hired her“.

She started painting during the time off in the Ladyhawke filming in Italy: “When I went to Italy to do Ladyhawke I had a lot of time off. It was a very difficult movie, and I was away for five months. It was the longest and the farthest I had ever been away from home. I decided I needed something that I could feel passionate about as acting, and something in which I could completely lose myself. I started painting, and I’m still doing it. I’ll be lying in bed and find myself thinking about how I could have handled that shadow differently. Finally I can’t sleep, thinking about how to paint this or that, and I say to myself, what are you doing? You got into this so that you wouldn’t drive yourself crazy”

Michelle had to test to get the part in The Witches of Eastwick (1987): “The thing that was infuriating to me that director George Miller wanted me for the role of Sukie all along. But the producers wanted me to test. Then, in the middle of the testing, one of the producers comes up to me and tells me that I have the part. Then they asked me to stay and read another part because there were other girls testing. So I have to read with this girl who’s testing for a part that I thought I had. I felt it was awful. I was sore as hell. If I want to do something, I’m really not that proud–I’ll go in and read; I’ll go in and test. If I really want to do something, I’ll go in and do whatever the director feels that he needs me to do.”

Her first real character role was as the red-headed, gum-cracking wife of a Mafioso in Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob (1988). Michelle had to make up to look tartly, with dark hair and terrible hairdo that only gets worse, and accorfing Michelle, “Isn’t it great?”

To play to Angela De Marco, the wife of a Mafia second lieutenant, in Married to The Mob (1988), Michelle had to learn the Queens accent: “I worked with a dialect coach called Richard Ericson who was fabulous, and I also went out to Long Island. The crew was fantastically helpful, too, because a lot of them were from there, and I would pick up things from them. On Long Island, Jonathan Demme’s nephew introduced me to some friends of his, who read all my lines into a tape recorder so I could hear the way they should sound.”

Michelle played Jo Ann, the silky restaurateuse, in Robert Towne’s Tequila Sunrise (1988). While her performance in the latter was almost unanimously praised, she remembers the experience only bitterly, deflecting for her work by saying that she hasn’t seen the film and has no plans to.

Pfeiffer was making her stage debut as the desirable countess Olivia in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night. To date, it has been her only experience on the theatre.

Michelle Pfeiffer met her ex-boyfriend Fisher Stevens during the rehearsal of the play Twelfth Night.

She lived in West Los Angeles, in a house, a sprawling Spanish hacienda-style place built in 1917

She struggled against the privations and anomalies of Soviet society during the set of The Russia House (1990). She complained about the black market, about the bureaucracy, about the ban against smoking in some jazz clubs. “Jazz. Cigarettes. I mean, the two are synonymous. And at that time I still smoked, and I felt that I had been deprived of so much, that I was furious.”

One of the days while she was filming The Russia House, she disclosed in response to a rule forbidding Western film companies from feeding the Soviet extras they hire. When Pfeiffer discovered this, she was furious and refused to work. “In a country where you can’t get food, where you can’t get soap, here they were watching us shoveling down these platefuls of hot, steamy spaghetti.” So she stomped off, very dramatic, and refused to come back unless they were fed.

In 1990 Michelle Pfeiffer and her friend Katherine Guinzburg created a production company Pfeiffer-Guinzburg Productions for the development of interesting roles. The reason was so Michelle could have more control over the kinds of roles that were offered her. The kinds of things they’ve been developing were an actress’s films, as opposed to ‘the girlfriend.’

Michelle chose to make Batman Returns (1992) not because it was going to be a blockbuster but because it fulfilled a childhood dream. She’d always wanted to be Catwoman, ever since she was a kid.

During the shooting of Batman Returns (1992), Michelle prepared her role to perfection. She walked around the house practicing her feline avenger’s antics (the kickboxing close-ups onscreen are all hers, though a stunt double did Catwoman’s backflips), also she was constantly cracking her Catwoman whip.

One of Michelle Pfeiffer’s catsuits from Batman Returns sold for $8,050 in 1994.

In June, 1993, the 17th Annual Women in Film luncheon in Beverly Hills seemed an unmemorable awards ceremony until Pfeiffer took the podium and set her sights on some of the very people who had turned out to honor her. “So … this is the year of the woman,” she said, her sarcasm scarcely veiled. “Well, yes, it’s actually been a very good year for women. Demi Moore was sold to Robert Redford for $1 million, Uma Thurman went for $40,000 to Mr. De Niro, and just three years ago Richard Gere bought Julia Roberts for… what was it? … $3,000? I’d say that was real progress.” Although Pfeiffer’s remarks elicited enthusiastic applause, they were particularly pointed, given the company she was in. Seated to the left of Pfeiffer was Sherry Lansing, the chairman of Paramount Pictures and the producer of Indecent Proposal as well as the luncheon’s mistress of ceremonies and a couple of tables away was the movie’s star, Demi Moore.

In June 1996, Michelle was the actress most loved by the readers of Fotogramas magazine.

Michelle Pfeiffer’s home has been decorated by Michael Smith, who also has designed the homes of Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman and The White House private quarters for Barack Obama.