“I just cried”: the only actor who left Michelle Pfeiffer starstruck
For some reason, it feels like Michelle Pfeiffer is an actor that you don’t see all that often. Despite her popping up this month in the new Prime Video show Margo’s Got Money Troubles, she is someone who seemed to be absolutely everywhere in the 1990s but then vanished.
The truth is that wasn’t quite the case, although when you look back at her Hollywood history, she does actually have a habit of stepping away from making movies for several years at a time. She also picks and chooses what she works on very carefully, resulting in periods of time like between 2000 and 2007, when, after the hit thriller What Lies Beneath, she only made three films in seven years.
She also made just four films between 2009 and 2017, meaning a new Pfeiffer movie is a pretty rare sighting all told, rather like a sensible Donald Trump tweet or a baby pigeon. But then she has been going quite a long time, all the way back to 1979 in fact, when she first started acting on TV, making her film debut in the 1980 comedy The Hollywood Knights.
Her big break came a couple of years later from the much-maligned Grease 2, but the following year she made up for it in a big way when she appeared alongside Al Pacino in Brian De Palma’s classic Scarface. That sent her into the Hollywood major leagues, and a string of hits followed with The Witches of Eastwick, Tequila Sunrise, Married to the Mob and then two films that earned her consecutive Academy Award nominations: Dangerous Liaisons and the 1989 musical drama The Fabulous Baker Boys.
By the time the ‘90s came around, Pfeiffer was known as one of the most famous and certainly one of the most beautiful women on the planet, something that 1992’s Batman Returns underlined as she prowled about the place and whipped mannequin heads off as Catwoman, and she had more massive hits with Dangerous Minds and One Fine Day with George Clooney.
You would think someone with the level of fame and career experience that Pfeiffer has could never be starstruck meeting a fellow colleague, but that wasn’t the case when she made one of her later movies, absolutely going to pieces when she turned up on the set of 2017’s whodunnit Murder on the Orient Express to be presented with British acting legend Dame Judi Dench.
Pfeiffer recalled the experience to Vanity Fair, saying, “When I met her, I just cried…tears coming down my face. Wah! I was just completely starstruck and moved by meeting her. It just takes jumping into the deep end, but it’s hard to trust that in the beginning. And so I was at that stage, and I’m acting in front of Judi Dench, and I’m thinking, ‘OK, you cannot bomb in front of Judi Dench. This just can’t happen‘.”
That might be understandable given Dench’s 60-plus years at the height of her profession, during which she has collected eight Academy Award nominations, winning two, and made a legacy as one of the greatest actors of her generation, but then Pfeiffer is no small change and has three nominations herself, in addition to eight Golden Globe nods. In the end, the Kenneth Branagh-directed Poirot adventure received fairly mixed reviews despite a star-packed cast including Willem Dafoe, Penelope Cruz, Johnny Depp and Olivia Colman, but it was a huge success at the box office, earning $350million on a budget of $55m.
