When you are famous for the luminous nature of your beauty, growing old could be a daunting prospect. With her latest role - perfectly cast in a story by Colette - Michelle Pfeiffer proves that her enduring star quality relies on far more than her looks, writes FIONA MCCANN.
SO THIS IS WHAT 50 looks like: smoking. At least, this is what Michelle Pfeiffer looks like at 50 – tiny, elegant, in a black wrap-around dress, heart-shaped face framed in impossibly curving blonde waves. Because for all her intelligence, her charisma and yes, even her age, it’s hard to get past the fact that Michelle Pfeiffer in person is still definingly beautiful. Blurred-edgedly, Monet-paintingly so. Yet she’s surprisingly circumspect for an Impressionist painting, measuring her answers and framing careful responses, clearly practised in press meets after decades of making movies.
This time around, she's promoting Chéri, the movie adaptation of a novel by Colette about an affair between a dissolute young Frenchman (Rupert Friend) and a retired courtesan 20 years his senior, played by Pfeiffer. And while Pfeiffer's Léa is no harridan, the film points up possible parallels in its examination of how the ageing process bends the path of a career based on beauty.
“It was a little bit daunting,” says Pfeiffer, up front about her qualms in taking on the role. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘Okay. This is really going into the eye of the storm, isn’t it? And you’re really going to have to deal with some things that are going to be uncomfortable for you, and you’re going to have to expose yourself in a way that’s going to make you feel really vulnerable.’ ”
She speaks slowly, with a guardedness that makes it clear whatever vulnerability Pfeiffer professes, it’s not on display in this interview. The actor has already moved on.
“Much in the same way that the dread of turning 50 came and went, and it was nothing, I had the same experience during the film. I anticipated it being a lot more difficult than it was.”
Turning 50, particularly in the kind of Tír na nÓg that is Hollywood, can’t have been easy, but Pfeiffer opts to paint it in a positive light. “I do think that it has kind of liberated me, because it’s done now, it’s over. I’m here, and that’s better than the alternative.”
If such a stoical approach to ageing is hard to entirely swallow in person, on screen a brutal emotional honesty comes to the fore in Pfeiffer’s portrayal of Léa, coming to terms with the romantic and professional consequences of fading beauty. It’s hard at times to separate the two: Léa catches her own reflection in the mirror, and we see Michelle Pfeiffer, whose face has certainly helped her fortune, taking stock.
In many ways it is Pfeiffer’s on-screen vulnerability, a convincing fragility that ripples under the veneer of unruffled calm, that makes Chéri so compelling. It is in its characters’ frailties that the film lifts itself from its Belle Époque setting, speaking to its 21st-century audiences of concerns both timeless and human.
“The ageing thing for women is stronger than ever really,” acknowledges Pfeiffer, pointing up how little has changed in 100 years. “But the big secret is, men are feeling this, too. Not like women are, because there is no comparison, but . . . we’re a real youth-obsessed culture.”
This may be true, yet Pfeiffer, who at 50 can lay little conventional claim to youth and should by that account be of an age where decent movie roles dry up, has no shortage of options. “I haven’t really had a difficulty finding material I like, and I’m working as much as I want to work,” she begins, before carefully correcting herself. “Actually, that’s not true. I would work more if I didn’t have children in school. I would be working all the time because I love to work so I’ve limited myself a lot.”
These limitations of her life, with her husband, Ally McBealcreator David E Kelley, and two children, Claudia Rose and John Henry, are hard to grasp when sitting in Knightsbridge's swanky Mandarin Oriental Hotel with its views of posh English schoolchildren exercising in Hyde Park.
Yet few projects tempt Pfeiffer to leave her family routine behind these days. It was the fact that Chéri, like the acclaimed Dangerous Liaisons, was written by Christopher Hampton and directed by Stephen Frears that got Pfeiffer on board. "It takes a lot to get me to leave my family in the middle of winter when the kids are in school, to go across the globe, so I was very excited about this."
This is a sumptuously filmed adaptation that sees Pfeiffer back in coiffed hair and vintage dresses against beautiful backdrops, though this time she is no pious victim of a seasoned seducer, but the experienced lover set to school a callow youth in the ways of love. And Léa, who has both profited from and been punished by the superficial, bon vivantsociety in which she moves, has played the system cannily, using her brain to make investments with the money earned by trading on her body.
“They made a lot of money ‘doing what they do’, being courtesans,” says Pfeiffer of women, like Léa, whose sexual power bought them a particular status in their day. “But they made their fortunes investing their money. You don’t make a fortune being a courtesan. You make a nice living. You know that you have a finite amount of time and when that face and that body starts to go, the income dries up.”
The parallels may seem obvious, but Pfeiffer bristles at any suggestion that she too was trading for a finite time on her sexual appeal. “If anything I veered away from that and saw the danger from day one.”
The evidence is there in the path taken by Pfeiffer, who has in her 20-odd years in cinema carved out an unconventional career for a blue-eyed blonde bombshell. Though at times since she has played knowingly to stereotype – for instance her gloriously sensuous turn as a slithering songstress in The Fabulous Baker Boys, and her defining Catwoman in Batman Returns– her choices have not given in to cliche, and she has often selected roles that play down her physical beauty.
At times it seemed it even worked against her, as when she was controversially cast for the role of Frankie in the film Frankie and Johnny. Playwright Terrence McNally had originally written the role for Kathy Bates, who played the part in the successful theatrical production. On losing the cinema role to Pfeiffer, Bates famously objected, saying the movie was unlikely to do justice to the original story about "ordinary people". The implication, clearly, that Pfeiffer was too pretty to be convincingly ordinary.
Yet Pfeiffer’s turn as the overworked waitress earned her a Golden Globe nomination, and she can now afford to be gracious about Bates, who co-stars in Chéri. “I didn’t ever hold that against her, because I know what it’s like,” says Pfeiffer with some irritation when this past animosity is raised. “People pin you for an answer and it’s taken out of context.”
It’s a wariness of the media that may explain why Pfeiffer is so measured in her responses, so initially stingy with that megawatt smile. Yet it’s hard not be grateful for her decision not to dazzle, something that must come easy to her. Instead, she is polite, even a little grave, as talk shifts between the professional and the personal, from her character Léa’s battles to those experienced by Michelle Pfeiffer, 50-year-old actor, mother, wife.
“It’s pretty universal,” she reminds me of her own confessed concern about her looks. “Certainly, there’s more pressure when you’re in the public eye, and you put more pressure on yourself. But I’m not alone.”
Yet she is adamant that she has not given in to plastic surgery. “I’ve had some of those things, you know, those treatments,” she says, refusing to be more specific for fear of inadvertently endorsing one. “I’m convinced now that none of it does anything. I think what works is eating well and staying fit and exercising.”
Though polite to a fault, she is understandably irked at being asked the same shallow questions about age and beauty. “I’ve been asked what is it like ageing in Hollywood since I was 35,” she says, breaking her composure with a flash of anger that makes her instantly more human. “Can you imagine asking Tom Cruise that now, and he’s close to my age! But that’s the world we live in.”
It’s a world where the gender stereotypes still hold sway. If, for example, the roles in Chéri were reversed and the film were about an older man seducing a younger, less experienced woman, would the impact be changed?
“In a way that would make me more uncomfortable,” admits Pfeiffer. “Isn’t that funny? Why is that?” She thinks for a moment, as if veering suddenly from the answers, prepared and honed, that she has given so many times before. “Now that’s a double standard!”
But a similar double standard that means Pfeiffer spends interview after interview answering questions about maintaining her looks and keeping slim or wrinkle-free, while her male counterparts – Kevin Bacon, Viggo Mortensen and Tim Robbins were all born in the same year, yet rarely field questions about Botox – get to wax lyrical about their art. Tellingly, they are also unlikely to be asked about how they balance career and family, though this is something that Pfeiffer is clearly willing to discuss.
“I always say that a woman can have everything, but you can’t do everything,” she says almost wistfully. “You can have a career and have a family, but if you’re the kind of person like I am, where you think you can do everything and you don’t need any help, just try juggling career and children and you’ll get over that really quick. That was very hard for me to accept.”
Family was part of the reason for her four-year hiatus from film, broken with her appearance – tellingly, as a witch obsessed with retaining the appearance of youth – in Stardusttwo years ago. It was a return she approached with some trepidation, but her lips stretch into a smile when she talks of acting and what it meant to her to rediscover it. "I was reminded of how much I really love it and how much it fed me, and I hadn't realised how much I'd been missing it."
Her guard lowering slowly over the interview, she only finally sheds it completely towards the end, when, as we discuss the demands of family and career, she offers me some advice out of the blue: “Freeze your eggs!” she smiles, then, again with her concern with accuracy, she checks with an assistant that suddenly materialises from the corner where she’s been hiding all the way through the interview: “Do you freeze eggs and sperm? Do you freeze ’em both?”
Suddenly, I’m the one under scrutiny, and Pfeiffer has cleverly turned the tables again, disappearing behind that killer smile as I grapple with her sudden imperatives. Fertility checks, role reversals, even a Colette character: it all adds up to a compelling case for sexual equality, but would Pfeiffer consider herself a feminist?
“I don’t know. I don’t know that I ever, ever label myself as anything,” she answers carefully. “I know that I’ve always been fiercely independent, and I know that it’s what I hope for my daughter, and I think I probably stand for many things that feminists stand for, but I don’t think I’ve ever labelled myself that.” Pause. “How would you define it?”
Umm, fair treatment and equality of the sexes? She laughs, and there it is, the big smile, the veil dropped, the dazzling, energised Michelle Pfeiffer who, for the first time in an interview notable for her one-word answers and polite replies, interrupts her interlocutor: “Then I’m a feminist! Where’s my picket sign?”
Chériis released on May 8th