Michelle Pfeiffer names the most important movie of her career: “It was such a departure”
At the risk of being extremely annoying, let me entreat you to feel sympathy for the actors in Hollywood who are so outrageously beautiful that they never get a chance to show the depth of their theatrical talent.
Marilyn Monroe tried again and again to be taken seriously but never managed to escape her pin-up status, and while Paul Newman got to play a range of complex roles, according to him, strangers would still stop him in the street and rip off his sunglasses just to catch a glimpse of those dreamy blue eyes.
These are not the world’s most pressing problems, but you can see how it would be demoralising to be constantly passed over for jobs just because no one believes you can rise above your looks, and no one knows this better than Michelle Pfeiffer, who found herself typecast early on because she has one of the most beautiful faces to ever fill a cinema screen.
She got her start in show business by winning Miss Orange County in 1978, and went on to secure small roles on television before landing her breakout part in Grease 2. These early milestones could easily have led to a career like Pamela Anderson’s, in which Pfeiffer would have been stuck in eye candy hell until making a mad dash for the exit in her 50s, but instead, she got an acting coach who believed that she could play whatever role she wanted to.
It wasn’t easy, though, when she practically had to force her way into the room with Brian De Palma to land her next breakout role in Scarface in 1983, and it would take another five years before she finally felt like she was able to show her real skills.
Until then, she was always cast as glamorous, even goddess-like figures, and through it all, her acting coach insisted that she wasn’t destined to be a generic leading lady. “She’s the one who told me that I was a character actress,” Pfeiffer said in a 1993 interview with Deseret News.
By the time 1988 rolled around, Pfeiffer was more than ready to prove that she was more than just a glamorous star. “I really think Married to the Mob broke that [image] because it was such a departure that it really shattered the whole thing,” she explained, adding that she had always wanted to work with Jonathan Demme and had loved the script.
Married to the Mob stars her as a disillusioned gangster’s wife who, upon the murder of her husband, tries to flee from his boss and start a new life with her son. It’s a comedy that sees Pfeiffer go from bored but glamorous housewife to hard-working single mother living in a dingy flat and trying to scrape by, and while she made the most of the role, in terms of complexity, it wasn’t exactly Lady Macbeth or Blanche DuBois.
In the years since, Pfeiffer has been able to take on meatier roles, earning an Oscar nomination for her turn as a lounge singer in the 1989 musical The Fabulous Baker Boys, in which she fully embraced her inherent glamour while plumbing the depths of her character’s emotions. It’s also worth singling out her performance in Mother!, Darren Aronofsky’s unhinged biblical allegory about climate change, apparently, in which she managed to be the only actor who seemed to know what she was doing.
