Fab Pfeiffer
After a five-year break,
the former beauty queen is back as a racist
and a witch. She tells Gill Pringle how
she has changed
Nobody could accuse Michelle Pfeiffer
of craving public affection. The former
beauty-pageant queen has never cared much
about being loved, and this perhaps explains
the odd choice of roles with which to
launch her comeback, following a five-year
absence. She portrays two thoroughly despicable
characters: a conniving racist in the
musical comedy Hairspray
and an ancient witch in fantasy film Stardust.
"It was hard
- the hardest thing. I've played some
evil characters before, and I've even
played some killers," says
Pfeiffer, discussing her decision to play
Hairspray's
hateful bigot Velma Von Tussle, having
not made a film since 2002's White
Oleander.
"I signed
on to do this and then sort of inched
my way towards this character until one
day, of course, it registered: 'Oh my
God. I'm playing a racist.' I talked to
my family because I understood that the
message of the piece was really important,
and certainly the message of the movie
is anti-racism and anti-bigotry. I wanted
to make sure my kids understood this is
what the movie's about; it's a really
important film and in order to do a movie
about racism, somebody has got to be the
racist and it's me!" she says,
laughing nervously, almost as if she is
still not entirely convinced herself as
to why she took on this remake of John
Waters's 1988 cult classic, though this
time based on the recent Tony-Award-winning
Broadway production about star-struck
teenagers on a racially-segregated 1960s
Baltimore dance show.
"But I'm so
glad I did it, because I had a lot of
fun playing the part, even though there
were some lines I honestly could not remember
because they were so hateful. Literally
I'd be doing a scene and I'd come up blank.
I'd be looking at Dana (played
by her co-star Queen Latifah) and
it was interesting what my brain did..."
Clearly Pfeiffer, 49, knew that she was
playing with fire - and all for the sake
of a career that she has long put in second
place to her role as mother to her adopted
mixed-race daughter Claudia Rose, 14,
and her biological son John Henry, 13.
"I don't normally
discuss roles with my kids unless there's
something that I feel might affect them
in some way or might cause them embarrassment
or discomfort. And they were OK, although
I think initially it was a shock because
they saw me out of context, and were like,
'Mom, what are you doing?'. They really
didn't know what to think because, remember,
they're young, and don't have any frame
of reference to that period really. I
don't think they thought it was all that
cool."
The actress has first-hand experience
of racism. "I
was in shocked at the prejudice, voiced
in some quarters, over my decision to
adopt a mixed-race baby. It's really surprising
that people still put so much emphasis
on it. None of us are pure anything. We're
all a mixture. Claudia is a beautiful
child, and some of the most beautiful
people I've seen in the world have been
of mixed race. As mother of both an adopted
child and my own birth-child, there is
absolutely no difference in the huge amount
of love I fee for both my children. I
always knew I wanted to adopt a child
and also have one of my own. There is
no difference at all.
"It's frightening
to me that the only reason Hairspray
got made again is because it's still relevant.
I am hoping that the next time somebody
decides to do a version, someone will
say: 'You know what? It's really an outdated
idea and not really relevant.' Wouldn't
that be nice?", asks Pfeiffer,
who co-stars with a barely-recognisable
John Travolta,
he in full drag.
If Pfeiffer launched her career on the
back of her looks — her beauty-pageant
title as Miss Orange County propelled
the one-time supermarket check-out girl
into her TV and film career — then
she would later discover that neither
beauty nor success were guarantees of
happiness.
Debuting on screen in a one-line role
on the TV series Fantasy
Island, she won her first small
film role in 1980's Falling
in Love Again, getting her
big break two years later in the lead
role of Stephanie in Grease
2. From here she was cast as
Al Pacino's
wife in the 1983 classic Scarface,
receiving considerable attention for her
drugged-up, icy character portrayal. It
was 1987's The
Witches of Eastwick, starring
alongside Cher,
Susan Sarandon
and Jack Nicholson
which cemented her career. A year later
she received a Best Supporting Actress
Oscar nomination for Dangerous
Liaisons and in 1989 a Best
Actress nod for her portrayal of a singer
in The
Fabulous Baker Boys. Her success
continued into the 1990s, as she branched
out into a variety of roles including
the romantic drama Frankie
and Johnny and Martin
Scorsese's adaptation of Edith
Wharton's The
Age of Innocence. She did Shakespeare
in A
Midsummer Night's Dream and
wore a skintight catsuit for Batman
Returns.
But in her private life she was lonely
and disappointed, following doomed affairs
with John Malkovich,
Michael Keaton
and Fisher Stevens,
and a brief marriage to the Thirtysomething
actor Peter Horton
(he played Gary). At 35 years old, she
adopted the babygirl Claudia Rose - an
event that would happily coincide with
meeting her future husband, the Ally
McBeal and Boston
Legal creator David
E Kelley - followed a year later
by the birth of their own biological son
John Henry.
'We all have our
baggage, and David and I are no different
from anyone else. And we've been to marriage
counselling. I'm a big proponent of therapy.
I've had a lot of it in my time and it's
really helped me. I think it's great to
spend time talking and thinking about
how your life is going.
"Ultimately,
I believe the only secret to a happy marriage
is choosing the right person. Life is
a series of choices, right?"
says the actress, who is determined to
preserve her personal happiness at all
costs - five years ago quitting Hollywood
at the peak of her career and moving with
her family to rural Northern California.
Did this pay off? She pauses: "I
think it has helped us as a family to
be less distracted and David and I to
be less distractive as parents, even though
I think we were pretty good when we lived
there, too, but we wanted to have more
land and animals on our property and you
couldn't do that there."
Later this year she stars as a witch
opposite Robert
De Niro, Sienna
Miller and Claire
Danes in Stardust.
"You don't
want to fall into the trap of just going
out and being mean because mean people
don't think they're being mean. Mean people
think they're completely justified in
their outbursts or their comments and
the truth underneath it all, they're fighting
and angry, they feel like the victim,
as twisted as they might be, so that's
also why it's so interesting to play those
because you kind of get to figure that
all out."
'Hairspray'
is out now at cinemas and `Stardust'
opens on 19 October. |
