"I made it difficult to hire me": Michelle Pfeiffer, the actress whose return Hollywood always awaits

There is a video that is more than three decades old that from time to time reappears on social networks and revolutionizes them.

Accumulate, only in this tweet, six million reproductions.

Reminder: Michelle Pfeiffer whipped the heads off those four mannequins IN ONE TAKE to thunderous applause from the Batman Returns crew!

pic.twitter.com/wVqyH4qw6A

— Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) February 19, 2021

In it, Michelle Pfeiffer (California, 64 years old) handles the whip in

(Tim Burton, 1992) without chromas or more special effects than her skill and rips off the heads of four mannequins in a single shot before receiving applause from all the team.

Her virality proves two things.

First, how intensely the actress prepared for a role that came to her on the rebound, as Annette Bening was chosen by Burton to play Catwoman but she quit at the last minute after becoming pregnant.

And second, the impact that Michelle Pfeiffer continues to have despite how sporadic her roles have been in recent years.

"I have seen it!

It's crazy, right?

It's like this character has seven lives.

She keeps coming back, celebrated the actress when asked about the clip.

He remembers that moment perfectly.

"It was fun.

I felt very satisfied with myself, because it was something that my double could not do and I could”.

While keeping the door open to reprising the role in the future, this week she slips back into another heroine costume, that of the original Wasp, Janet Van Dyne, in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,

alongside by Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lily.

actress

he is full of praise for his mother on screen.

She "she Not only is she the most beautiful woman who has ever walked the planet Earth, she is also charming."

She's the kind of enthusiastic reaction that she usually gets.

Kate Capshaw, a close friend of hers for more than forty years, affirms that every time she sees her, she needs a few minutes to recover from her beauty.

His presence in the Marvel movie was a dream of director Peyton Reed.

He was so clear that for the first installment of the saga, in which the character only appeared briefly and masked, he hired an actress who looked like her.

That Reed could finally fulfill his dream was a lottery.

Pfeiffer is as famous for her portrayals as she is for her rejected roles: She Said No to

, and

, the one no she regrets.

Since 2000, the actress has been going in and out of the cinema at will and only joining projects that pose some kind of challenge or allow her to work with people she likes.

She has little to prove.

Her career is prodigious in variety and quality.

She has made drama, comedy, musicals,

and period films, she has been a villain for Disney and a superhero in Marvel and DC, her films have grossed more than seven billion dollars at the box office and she has accumulated eight Golden Globe nominations (six of them consecutive), and three to the Oscar.

Michelle Pfeiffer in a 1979 promotional portrait. Walt Disney Television Photo Archives (ABC)

He was the true movie deity of the eighties and nineties.

Meryl Streep may have taken all the awards, but Pfeiffer was hogging the covers.

She Hasn't Forgotten Most of Her Paul Rudd says that when all the stars from the different sagas came together in the mighty finale of

and that includes half a dozen Oscar winners), no one aroused as much enthusiasm as she did.

"While we were walking, I could hear Mark Ruffalo saying to Chris Hemsworth: Oh my gosh, that's Michelle Pfeiffer!"

start off on the wrong foot

She was always clear that she wanted to be an independent woman.

At fourteen she lied about her age to get a job as a cashier in a supermarket, but as she collected a few melons she wondered if that was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

One day, as she recalled on her Instagram account, she said to herself: "You have to start somewhere" and she signed up for Miss Orange County.

She won, she got to participate in Miss California and there she was sixth.

She was not interested in victory, she had a plan B: her hairdresser had told her that one of the judges was an agent that she used to book the contestants.

And he signed her.

She came out of there without a crown, but with an agent.

The small roles began to arrive and they all had one characteristic: from the script her character was defined as "a sex bomb".

"What if people don't think I'm sexy?"

she wondered, as she confessed many years later.

"I'm going to look like an asshole."

Nobody thought of it.

And she set a maxim for herself: "Every time I chose a role, I made sure that it was something a little better than the last."

Her lack of experience was not an impediment for her to be hired as the protagonist of

alongside Maxwell Caulfield, the star of the soap opera

Probably one of the worst ideas of the eighties and that's saying a lot about the decade in which there were movies like

about an alien duck.

The shock wave of her failure was such that both director Brian de Palma and Al Pacino refused to cast her for

They only gave in at the insistence of the producer.

Today one of the most remembered images of the film is that of Pfeiffer going down in a glass elevator with her lingerie dress, the protagonist of articles like this one from

.

Michelle Pfeiffer in her Catwoman outfit in 'Batman Returns' (1992)WARNER BROS.

PICTURES (Corbis via Getty Images)

When success began to show, the inevitable impostor syndrome arrived.

“I didn't come from Juilliard [the prestigious New York art school].

He was learning in full view.

So I've always had the feeling that one day they're going to find out that I'm really a fraud, that I don't know what I'm doing,” he confessed to

in 2017. He also had to face the part he hates most about his job: the press.

A punishment for a star who has always had a strong sense of privacy, perhaps because he is well aware of the dangers of his environment.

Shortly after settling in Hollywood, she was about to be abducted by the sect of

, a cult that claims you can live on sunlight.

She was saved by the fact that at the time her first husband, Peter Horton (the gorgeous literature professor Gary Shepherd from

) was preparing his role in a movie about cults and everything he told her about his character made her see that he was exactly what she was living.

too pretty for the world

One of the reasons for the persecution to which the press submits her is the obsession with that physique that continues to leave her friends speechless, something that makes her uncomfortable.

“I don't know if I've ever felt extraordinary.

I know I'm not.

If anything, I've always felt that she was conventionally pretty, which is an advantage in some ways and not in others.

It's one of those things where you're screwed either way."

Jonathan Demme, who directed her in

magazine

after its premiere

“I think Michelle has such a compelling face that people have tended to choose her for the looks of her.

She has shown enormous patience with those of us who tend to focus first on how gorgeous she is."

Her beauty made many look down on her, believing that before them they only had a pretty face.

She does not have a reputation for being an easy actress, which is equivalent in Hollywood parlance to the fact that she is not limited to being a vase.

She had her ups and downs with director Richard Donner in

(1985), the delicious medieval fable about an impossible love.

Pfeiffer did not want to be just an ethereal lady that she pity for hers loved hers for the forests wrapped in tulle, so the script changed and today it is an indisputable cult work that meant the first step in the consolidation as a star of Pfeiffer .

Michelle Pfeiffer and her husband, David E. Kelley, in 1995. Kypros (Getty Images)

The second was the success was

(1987), in which he fought the demonic arts of Jack Nicholson alongside Susan Sarandon and Cher.

With her next job,

(1987), in which she, covered in a black wig, played an Italian housewife, came her first Golden Globe nomination. All eighty of hers were hers.

The following year he achieved his first Oscar nomination with

(1988), alongside Glenn Close, an almost debutante Uma Thurman and John Malcovich (the romance between the two in real life dynamited the actor's marriage to the also actress Glenne Headly).

The next time he was about to win the statuette was for

(1989).

The overhead shot that shows her dressed in a spectacular red dress singing on a grand piano became an iconic image.

“What she's doing while she's performing that song isn't just singing;

it's what Rita Hayworth did in

and Marilyn Monroe did in

” enthused critic Roger Ebert.

No one questioned her talent anymore, but she had to overshadow her beauty for one of those casting decisions that inexplicably works: playing the self-conscious waitress in

(1991), a role written and staged by Kathy Bates.

She also proved credible as the sophisticated Countess Olenska in

(1993) or the innocent Southern housewife who crosses the country to meet Kennedy in

(1992), which earned her a third Oscar nomination.

In the nineties, in addition to consolidating his stardom, he broke the box office with

(1992) and founded the production company Via Rosa in which he produced the roles that interested him, such as

(1995).

and

(1996).

With the start of the new millennium and while he was still at the top, he retired to spend more time with his family.

some new priorities

“I didn't want to stop working, but I became very demanding with my requirements,” he explained.

"Where is it recorded?

How long does the shoot last?

Can I bring the children?

I made it difficult to hire me.

And it looks good to me."

Her departure from Hollywood was not traumatic.

She didn't slam the door like Debra Winger, fed up with the lack of papers.

She, too, was met with industry pushback like Meg Ryan.

She didn't feel like there was no longer a place for her, like Cameron Diaz.

Her priorities simply changed.

Michelle Pfeiffer in a scene from 'Dangerous Minds' (1995). Archive Photos (Getty Images)

In 1993 he adopted a girl and months later he began a relationship with the producer of

and

David E. Kelley, which has lasted thirty years.

She retired to a ranch in San Francisco and she was able to enjoy privacy and the things she really likes, like oil painting and putting on her tool belt to build things.

She wasn't even aware that she had withdrawn from her until her children asked her when she planned to return to work.

In recent years, his forays on the big screen have become small events and aging is a recurring theme in almost all of his feared interviews.

"All that really matters to me is that I am able to age gracefully and never look like a wax figure of myself," she confessed to People in 1999. Already then, almost a quarter of a century ago, she was asked about her age. .

Since his return he only does what he wants, he has alternated blockbusters (

and the

or

sagas ) with small independent productions.

With

, she got her last Golden Globe nomination in 2021. For the sake of cinema and viewers, we hope that Michelle Pfeifer has many comebacks left.

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