Hollywood’s former golden girl is making a comeback
After taking time off to bring up her children, the star of The Fabulous Baker Boys is back with a host of big budget new movies
T HAS been a lifelong anxiety. She had said something similar to director Steve Kloves while filming The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1989, telling him: “I think I’m doing a terrible job in this.”
Pfeiffer blames her insecurity on her rapid success in acting after a short stint in modelling, having briefly trained as a court stenographer and even spent time bagging groceries in a supermarket.
“I started working fairly quickly and wasn’t ready,” she told Interview magazine recently. “I didn’t have any formal training. I’ve always had this feeling that one day they’re going to find out that I’m really a fraud, that I really don’t know what I’m doing.”
Withdrawing from Hollywood, Pfeiffer focused instead on the joys of motherhood. She attended her children’s school plays, watched their soccer and volleyball matches, saw them run in track races and compete in show jumping.
She joined them baking banana cake with butter-cream frosting, SHE’S BACK: (from top) with Claudia Rose and David last month; looking Fab in 1989 FEIFFER doesn’t object to the use of Botox, fillers and other cosmetic procedures to remain looking young “as long as your face still moves and you can show expression” and she won’t rule out going under the knife. “I’m not saying that I won’t at some point. It’s harder and harder the older you get to say ‘never’.”
Pfeiffer grew up near LA in a working class family, winning the Miss Orange County beauty pageant, moving to Hollywood and falling in with a bizarre “breatharianism” cult that believed humans can exist with virtually no food or water. She found a talent agent and was saved from the cult by actor Peter Horton, who became her first husband. She got her big chance in Grease 2 in 1982, followed by her breakthrough role as a mobster’s moll in Scarface with Al Pacino.
The Witches Of Eastwick was followed by three Oscar nominations in a four-year span for Dangerous Liaisons, The Fabulous Baker Boys and Love Field.
Pfeiffer divorced Horton after seven years in 1988 and careered through romances with Val Kilmer, John Malkovich, Michael Keaton and a three-year relationship with actor Fisher Stevens, before deciding to start a family on her own, adopting Claudia Rose in March 1993. “I said, ‘To hell with figuring out the man thing before I start a family’. I really wanted to have kids and I think my desperation to do that was messing up my relationships.”
Yet just two months after beginning the adoption process Pfeiffer met David E Kelley, creator of TV hits including Chicago Hope, The Practice and Boston Legal. Claudia Rose was christened during their November 1993 marriage ceremony, Pfeiffer became pregnant on their wedding night and the next year she gave birth to their son John Henry. “When I met David all of that pressure was off,” she explains. “It was really just about, how do David and I work together?”
Almost 24 years on and despite her insecurities Pfeiffer feels driven to make her comeback succeed. “I don’t know if it’s naïveté or just narcissism but I start out with this notion that I can do anything. It’s not until I get into it that I realise what I’ve thrown myself into and then I will do anything not to humiliate myself. And that, I think, is the secret to my success.”