“Firmly, and underline firmly”: the movie Michelle Pfeiffer was banned from starring in
Anybody who grew up in the early 1990s will remember Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns, and even if you weren’t one of the thousands of young people who had their sexual awakening watching her crack a whip, her performance as the feline antihero was impossible to ignore.
She’s easily one of the most important parts of the Batman film universe, but she could have joined it one movie earlier. Prior to Batman Returns, director Tim Burton brought us a film simply titled Batman, which not only featured Michael Keaton as the ‘Caped Crusader’, but also a number of other iconic DC characters, such as The Joker, played by Jack Nicholson, Harvey Dent, played by Billy Dee Williams, and, of course, good old Alfred, played by Michael Gough, joining in on the fun, as well as Vicki Vale.
A reporter and love interest for Bruce Wayne, Vale was originally supposed to be played by Sean Young, but she unfortunately suffered a horse-riding accident and was ruled out of the movie.
This led to a frantic scramble to find a replacement, one of the many reasons that Burton felt “sick” while trying to cobble the film together. Pfeiffer was one of the names on the shortlist, coming off the back of Married to the Mob and Dangerous Liaisons, so would have been an ideal pick. However, the powers that be were conspiring against her.
Robert Wuhl played fellow journalist and Vale’s friend Alexander Knox in the movie, and spoke to The Hollywood Reporter as part of a retrospective on Batman, where he revealed why the Scarface star was kept out of the production.
“To put a little fly in the ointment, Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer had previously dated and broken up,” he said, “At the time, Michael told me he was trying to get back with his ex-wife. Keaton was firmly, and underline firmly, against that casting of Pfeiffer.”
Keaton would divorce his wife, Caroline McWilliams, in 1990, presumably after a period of turmoil. It’s unclear if Wuhl is implying that Keaton dated Pfeiffer before he married his wife or during, but the result was the same: Pfeiffer didn’t get the part. Vicki Vale was played by Kim Basinger instead, and the former ended up starring in The Fabulous Baker Boys, which ended up earning her an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
As we all know, Pfeiffer did join the franchise just three years later, so she and Keaton must have smoothed over their differences. Ultimately, it probably worked out for the best that she wasn’t in Batman. If she had played Vicki Vale, then she wouldn’t have been able to play Catwoman in the sequel, which was the much better option for both the movie and her career.
Spare a thought for poor Sean Young in all of this, as not only did she miss out on Vicki Vale, but she also auditioned for Pfeiffer’s part in Batman Returns, infamously turning up to her audition in a homemade Catwoman costume, the negative backlash to which contributed to her decision to leave Hollywood.
