In "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton's tale of 1870s New York, Michelle Pfeiffer plays Countess Ellen Olenska, a product of society returning home after the scandal of a failed European marriage.
The film seethes with high melodrama and great, if suppressed, romance. The dialogue is elevated, the costumes gorgeous, the decor sumptuous. Director Martin Scorsese brings an elaborate visual scheme to bear on the material. Daniel Day-Lewis plays the male lead with an almost old-fashioned flourish.In other words, it is a classic leading-lady part.
Just one problem: Michelle Pfeiffer doesn't really consider herself a leading lady. Instead, she agrees with her famous acting coach, Peggy Feury, who began guiding Pfeiffer when she was starting her movie career making films such as "Grease 2."
"She's the one who told me that I was a character actress," Pfeiffer recalls. "With the first thing I did in her class, she looked at me and she said, `You just need to play as many different kinds of characters as you can.' And that's what I did."
When Pfeiffer makes that claim, you almost have to decide between trusting your ears and believing your eyes. For even in person, Pfeiffer retains her on-screen charisma.
The California-born actress, 35, has the lean athletic build you might expect from someone who spent her formative years as what she calls a "surfer chick" around the Huntington Beach pier, and it's matched by an easy, elegant grace. A simple blue dress, plain hoop earings and a beaten-silver cross do nothing to detract from the glamour she exudes.
So who can blame Hollywood for pigeonholing her all the way until 1988 and the film that Pfeiffer says changed her career.
"I really think `Married to the Mob' broke that (image) because it was such a departure that it really shattered the whole thing," she says with a laugh.
"It was such an opportunity for me," she says. "At that point people had very specific ideas and not terribly varied ideas about the kinds of roles that I could play, and I just jumped at the chance. Not only was I dying to work with Jonathan Demme, I thought, `Oh, great, now Jonathan wants to do this with me and I won't like the script.' And I read it and I was so elated. It was just a great part."
Playing parts - on stage and off - is nothing new for Pfeiffer.
Early on, Pfeiffer had "played" a beauty contestant in real life when she won the title of Miss Orange County. She had grown up in Midway City, attended high school in Fountain Valley, and was commuting between Orange County and Los Angeles trying to get a career started.
"I did it specifically to meet a commercial agent," she says with a trace of ruefulness. "In fact the friend of mine who recommended it to me was nearly thrown out of my house. I said, `Are you out of your mind?' He said, `Well, wait a minute. There'll be a commercial agent there and he's going to sign people.' I had no other `in' really to this business."
The pageant itself was less than it was cracked up to be.
"It was really a joke pageant. There was no Miss Orange County category. It was the Miss Los Angeles County pageant and they ended up giving out seven titles or something ridiculous like that. They made up Miss Orange County in the Miss Los Angeles County pageant; it made no sense at all. . . . For all intents and purposes I shouldn't be here really, where I am. The pageant route is not historically a really successful avenue for women to take."
She used the technique of disappearing into a part for Countess Ellen in "Age of Innocence."
"It helps very much when you put those clothes on and you're cinched into that corset and you're carrying around all of those layers of clothes; you can't help but walk differently and feel differently and present yourself differently," she says.
Pfeiffer was going to have to find that character not just amid the satin and lace of 19th-century fashion but also while dodging the famously tracking, whirling camera of director Scorsese. She admits that was a concern at first.
"That certainly was something that I thought about, but fortunately Marty moves the camera to emphasize the emotion of the scene," she says. "He doesn't do it frivolously. There's only one moment - and I won't tell you what it is - but there's one moment in a scene, and we had to block it and it was wrong. We kept trying to make this move work and he had a hard time even cutting it. But other than that, every move that he had planned was right, it made sense . . ."
The phrase "I won't tell you what it is" comes up a lot with Pfeiffer.
Sometimes she says it out loud, as when she politely declines to discuss her newly adopted daughter, Claudia Rose.
It's not that she's not friendly; she quickly laughs with another parent over how hard it is to get organized to go out with children ("Out the door? Forget it!"). Pfeiifer's love life has always been fairly hush-hush for a movie star, but she did announce this week that she will be marrying David E. Kelley, the writer/producer of "L.A. Law" and "Picket Fences."
But Pfeiffer, despite some pointed public remarks she made recently over Hollywood's so-called Year of the Woman, prefers to keep her own counsel.
Director Jonathan Kaplan recalls making "Love Field" with Pfeiffer several years ago. (The movie was finally released last December.)
"It was interesting because Michelle was supposed to do `Silence of the Lambs' and Jodie Foster was going to do `Love Field.' " Kaplan says. "But Jodie told me, `There's this other movie I want to do which, if Michelle Pfeiffer drops out of, I'm going to get.' And Michelle dropped out of `Silence of the Lambs' for the same reasons I couldn't have made it.
"There was something about it that was so ugly and so repulsive to her that she couldn't do it, she couldn't spend seven or eight months of her life in that world. So Jodie went to that and Michelle came to `Love Field.' "
Pfeiffer says her approach to acting can be "a little bit of a painful process."
"It's a real love/hate relationship. There's always a part of me that just dreads starting another movie. Just dreads it. You always have to clean up the mess at the end. And the other actors are creating their own mess and slopping over into each other's messes."
Pfeiffer has come off a particularly grueling stretch of making films, including "Love Field," "Frankie and Johnny," "Batman Returns," "The Age of Innocence," and "Wolf," the Mike Nichols film in which she plays the spouse of a business executive, played by Jack Nicholson, who is a werewolf. In fact she had so little time between "Batman" and "Innocence" that she did not have time to let her pumped-up Catwoman muscles atrophy into something more 19th-century ladylike.