The movie that stopped Michelle Pfeiffer from quitting: “I was out of work for a year”
Michelle Pfeiffer has always had a love-hate relationship with acting. Over the years, the iconic star has vacillated from feeling intimidated by Hollywood to loving the movie-making process, to, at one point, running her own production company before almost walking away from the business entirely when she became a mother.
Interestingly, though, long before she became incredibly picky about her roles because she didn’t want to miss her kids’ childhoods, which led to a self-imposed exile, Pfeiffer went through a period when she thought the industry itself had sent her into one.
The actor first burst onto the scene in the early 1980s with roles in Grease 2, an unmitigated failure, and Scarface, a controversial success. You see, even though the former was a critical and commercial disaster, Pfeiffer emerged unscathed thanks to a well-received performance. The same was true for the latter, which was accused of being gratuitously violent and in bad taste, but once again, her performance within it was largely praised.
Suddenly, Pfeiffer was on the brink of superstardom, and she followed Scarface with roles in Into the Night, Ladyhawke, and Sweet Liberty. None of these movies set the world on fire in terms of reviews or box office, but they still established Pfeiffer’s profile as a Hollywood leading lady. Then, to her shock, work began to dry up because the projects she was being offered held little to no interest to her. After a while, things started to look very grim, and a future in the business began to seem less and less likely.
“There was one point in 1986… when I was out of work for at least a year,” she confessed to The Scotsman in 2009. “It was the first time I’d thought maybe I’d better look at doing something else. I don’t know what I would have done.”
During this period, a frustrated Pfeiffer fought hard against Hollywood’s attempts to mould her into a sex symbol. “I used to ring my agent and wail, ‘They’re putting me in hotpants again!'” she revealed. You can’t blame a woman for wanting to be a “serious” actor, and she had no desire to trade on her looks. Thus, she did something few actors would conceive of doing that early in their careers: she turned everything down. “If nothing else, that taught me to be resilient,” she explained, adding, “To survive in Hollywood, you need resilience more than talent.”
However, just when the situation looked its bleakest, Pfeiffer was handed a lifeline. A script came across her desk that cast her as a mousy mother of six, abandoned by her husband, who discovers that she and her spinster friends have supernatural powers and form an inadvertent coven. When a mysterious stranger, who may or may not be the Devil himself, shows up in their town, their latent powers are activated, and they transform into potent, confident witches.
This script was, of course, The Witches of Eastwick, and Pfeiffer believed she had finally found a role she could sink her teeth into. So, instead of quitting Hollywood, she signed up for the movie that would be her true breakthrough as an A-list star. The film, directed by Mad Max’s George Miller, starred Pfeiffer alongside Jack Nicholson, Cher, and Susan Sarandon, and it was a hit to the tune of $103million.
Within three years of its release, Pfeiffer had notched two Oscar nominations for her roles in Dangerous Liaisons and The Fabulous Baker Boys, and any thoughts of leaving Hollywood stayed in the rearview until 2003, when she took four years off to focus on her family.
