Flurry of activities
After a hiatus, Michelle Pfeiffer makes a return to Hollywood.
WHEN Michelle Pfeiffer first read Darren Aronofsky’s script for Mother!, she had an understandable initial reaction.
“I thought: What the hell is this?” recalls Pfeiffer.
Aronofsky’s film is not in any way typical, nor is the kind of project you’d expect a long-absent actress like Pfeiffer to join as her first big-screen performance in five years.
The film, intentionally shrouded in mystery, is a wild and weird odyssey by one of the movies’ expert conjurers of dark, surreal dream worlds that suspend its viewers – and often its performers, too – in a vividly atmospheric state of paranoia.
The good news is that this film represents the start of what may be a kind of renaissance for the 59-year-old actress, whose steely beauty and cool, piercing intelligence remains just as devastating.
“I’m really excited to be back,” says Pfeiffer. “Especially having worked with these exciting actors and these directors who I so admire. The most exciting for me is all of these really talented people that I’m able to do movies with.”
Pfeiffer co-stars in Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming, more old-fashioned mystery Murder On The Orient Express. She has joined the cast of the Ant-Man sequel and earlier this year pre- miered the Sundance Film Festival entry Where Is Kyra? in which she plays a woman struggling to survive in Brooklyn on her ailing mother’s income.
She also received an Emmy nomination for her cocktail-drinking, chain-smoking Ruth Madoff in The Wizard Of Lies.
It’s a flurry of activity for Pfeiffer, who says she pulled back partially to focus on family. She and her husband, the TV producer David E. Kelley, who live in northern California, have two children. Now an emptynester, Pfeiffer has eagerly returned to regular work.
“She wasn’t on my mind because she hadn’t worked for a while,” says Aronofsky. “My casting director mentioned that she was interested in working again. I was immediately excited and interested by the idea of it. It’s been a while so I wasn’t so sure where she was at. But once we started to talk, it was amazing.” Aronofsky, long a fan of Pfeiffer, was impressed by her still sharp skills.
“I just wanted to applaud her at different times during the movie because she does things that are so hard to do,” he says. “Like those things where someone says something in the moment and you’re supposed to react in the moment with surprise or and she was doing it take after take.”
After her Oscar-nominated breakthrough role in 1989’s The Fabulous Baker Boys, Pfeiffer became one of the top actresses in Hollywood, stringing together a varied filmography including Dangerous Minds, Batman Returns, The Age Of Innocence and What Lies Beneath. That made her intimiher dating to younger co-star.
“It took me two days to get over her beauty, and to go up to her and say ‘hi’ her Mother! co-star Jennifer Lawrence told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival. “She’s very normal. She’s a mother. She’s a very smart woman.” – AP