Imagine you are born a sun-kissed California blonde.
As a teenage checkout girl, you decide to become an actor. You know no one in the entertainment industry, so you enter a beauty contest to catch an agent’s eye. You win. Within a year, you are on TV in soap commercials and bombshell roles. (That’s your character’s name on one show: The Bombshell. You call her Barbara.)
The movies come — bad ones, better ones. There are million-dollar pay cheques, magazine covers, award nominations. You step away, for years at a time, to care for your young family. A decade goes by. Then two. You are a grandmother now, but still beloved, still desired. And the roles, the ones you choose with care, are still rich. Now you can relax, confident in your talent, your success.
Unless you are Michelle Pfeiffer. At 67, she is busier than ever, a movie queen lately reinvented as a small-screen star. She is also as unsettled as ever about her relationship with her work and how she goes about it.
Pfeiffer has not participated substantively in an ongoing series since the 1970s, but this autumn she has two: The Madison, a lachrymose Taylor Sheridan drama that landed last weekend on Paramount Plus; and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a screwy, sweet-hearted dramedy that debuts on April 15 on Apple TV. Both showcase an actor in expert command of her powers. Both prompted her typical unease.
“I always go into a part with some trepidation, because I never quite know how I’m going to go about it,” she says over lunch. She sounds mildly regretful. “I’d love to be able to skate through some of these things.”
Skating is not in her repertoire. “That’s why she is the actress that she is,” says Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed The Madison.
“She has never sat back in any role in her career.”
Nearly five decades into that career, Pfeiffer is trying, falteringly, to learn different habits: to let go a little more, to vanish into her roles a little less, to resist an inclination to obsess.
“That’s not healthy,” she says. But that is all she has ever known. She seems sincere in her desire to ease up on her perfectionism, and unsure of the actor and the person she would be without it.
I meet Pfeiffer on a cloudless February day at an unassuming Santa Monica restaurant. The restaurant’s interior is cool and otherwise deserted, which means she can enjoy the relative anonymity she prefers. It has taken my eyes a little while to adjust to the dimness, and longer to adjust to Pfeiffer, who has the kind of prettiness that makes a person dazed and squinty. I might as well have gone back outside and stared up at the sun.
Pfeiffer has never been comfortable in trading on her beauty. She isn’t comfortable with press, either. She tolerates interviews better than she used to, especially those for her fragrance company, Henry Rose. But talking about her work to a stranger is a very mild form of torture.
“It’s emotional,” she says. “I start to feel anxious about it, the exposure.”
During the meal, she is never less than gracious, sharing her vegetable sides, answering questions with what feel like real honesty. She is also palpably shy. I feel protective of her, even as I am aware that a star like her — a star who has played Catwoman! — does not need protecting. I’ve never sat across from someone in whom such strength and such fragility collide.
If beauty (incontestable unless you are Pfeiffer, who has described her face as duck-like) explains some of the fascination she exerts on-screen, even more compelling is the emotive tension she brings to many of her characters, who feel deeply even as they try to protect and withhold those feelings.
Acting began early for her. As a child in what she called “an unpredictable household”, she play-acted her personality, behaving in ways she thought would keep her safe. In many of her best performances — in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) or The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), say — there is a child’s watchfulness layered underneath, a child’s fear of hurt.
Pfeiffer’s attitude towards her work has always been a dance of approach and avoidance. After those early bombshell years, she was vigilant about the parts she took. (An agent nicknamed her Dr No.) By the 2000s, married to the prolific writer and producer David E. Kelley and a mother to two young children, she became even more careful, declining offers that would disrupt family life. She loved motherhood and was grateful for how it blunted her tendency to obsess over her work.
“It forces you out of your narcissism,” she says. “I was a much happier person when I became a mom.”
Once both children were in college, she returned more fully to acting. The offers had been there before, but many were unappealing — “evil stepmother or parts that just felt very demeaning to women”, she says. Now there were a few that felt better.
In 2017, she took her first major TV role in decades, as Ruth Madoff, the wife of the convicted financial scammer Bernie Madoff in the HBO film The Wizard Of Lies. Several movies quickly followed.
Why return at all when she had such mixed feelings about the industry and how it treated women, particularly older women? Because even as motherhood had been a respite from work, work had been a respite, too, from the preoccupations of an overactive mind.
“It has been such a gift and got me through so many things,” she says. “I’m just better busy.”
She is very busy now, particularly in The Madison, which Sheridan wrote for her. “I needed a woman with a real internal strength as well as a very deep emotional well,” Sheridan writes in an email. Pfeiffer has that.
Pfeiffer plays Stacy Clyburn, the matriarch of a wealthy Manhattan clan who decamps to Montana after a personal tragedy. Both Pfeiffer and Stacy are self-described city mice, and both benefit from long, loving marriages. But Pfeiffer had trouble with the part. She often begins by finding a thread of something in her own life she can connect to the character. With the pampered Stacy, who learns self-sufficiency while wearing silk pyjamas, she struggled to find that string.
Was she really struggling, or was this her perfectionism talking? Certainly, some co-stars observed greater ease.
Beau Garrett and Elle Chapman, who play Stacy’s daughters, marvelled at Pfeiffer’s naturalness in character and assuredness on set. “She has a gravitas to her,” Garrett says. “People just quiet down when she’s around.” She says it was a privilege to be yelled at by Pfeiffer in fraught family scenes. This is echoed by Chapman.
“She has a gaze that can completely level you,” she says admiringly.
But the naturalness doesn’t come naturally, or at least not entirely. Kurt Russell, who plays Stacy’s husband, previously worked with Pfeiffer on the dubious 1988 thriller Tequila Sunrise.
“It looks effortless, but it’s not at all effortless,” he says in an interview.
Sheridan also saw the cost.
“I honestly don’t know how Michelle was able to access that level of emotion take after take, and day after day,” he says.
“An actor of her talent and skill could have easily pulled any number of tricks out of her basket, but she didn’t. Not once. She forced herself to embrace the suffering.”
The Madison shot two six-episode seasons, about a year apart. In between, Pfeiffer shot the first season of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, based on the celebrated Rufi Thorpe novel. The show is about a young woman, Margo (Elle Fanning), who becomes unexpectedly pregnant and then supports herself as a cam girl. Pfeiffer plays Shyanne, Margo’s mother, a former Hooters server now engaged to a youth minister.
Kelley created the series. It is Pfeiffer’s first meaningful collaboration with him since she played a part in his 1996 film To Gillian On Her 37th Birthday.
This was by choice. When they were first married, in 1993, appearing on a TV series, Kelley’s typical domain, would have been a career embarrassment. Besides, Pfeiffer says, “When I come home from work and I’ve had a bad day, I want him to be on my side. I want to him to believe my version.” That trumped co-working.
But television is no longer the comedown it used to be. And when Kelley read the novel, he knew for Shyanne he needed an actor who could be both despicable and loveable, who could credibly say a line like “I’m just terrible at everything except being pretty”, who could command sympathy even as she repelled it.
“I really just couldn’t see anyone else but her playing Shyanne,” Kelley says.
Pfeiffer feels good about these recent shows — as good as she allows herself to feel, at least (And Kelley confirms that so far their marriage has survived). She has always disappeared into her roles, but this time, because she was going back and forth between projects and taking time out to visit her husband and her daughter and granddaughter, she couldn’t do her usual vanishing act. She doesn’t think the work has suffered.
“If you’re going to survive, you’re going have to figure out a way to do this and enjoy your life and not disappear,” she says. She sounds confident. This is towards the end of the interview, and she has exposed herself enough. A few minutes later, she slips away into the restaurant’s shadows and then back out into the sun.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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