Los Angeles Times: For Michelle Pfeiffer, aging gracefully is her role

By Rachel Abramowitz
Los Angeles Times
Excerpt
June 27, 2009

Michelle Pfeiffer insists it was all in the "lighting."

The 51-year-old actress is discussing an arresting scene in her new film, "Cheri," where she literally seems to age a decade, all under the unflinching eye of the camera. It's one take -- no cuts, no special effects. Clearly lighting helped, as did director Stephen Frears, who insisted that her character, an aging French courtesan, smile luminously throughout the early part of the film, purposely saving the shock of what Pfeiffer calls the "droopage" for that moment. "When your face is in repose, everything drops and you age," she explains, with a chortle. "I'd like to say that we used prosthetics but we didn't."

What she glosses over is the utter pathos she brings to the scene, that of a beautiful woman staring into the abyss of age and loneliness.

For those who grew up on Pfeiffer's icy beauty in "Scarface," or watched her writhe on top of a grand piano in "The Fabulous Baker Boys," or giggled during " Batman Returns," when, as Catwoman, she snapped her whip with sadomachistic glee, a senescent Pfeiffer is almost an unimaginable concept. In person, she appears as a beautiful, mature woman of indeterminate age. The skin is still creamy, the cheekbones curvy and pronounced, the eyes that eerie green-blue. Over tea at the Four Seasons, she is dressed for anonymity, arriving in a gray top, black slacks, and black Jackie-O glasses that almost completely obscure her famous visage. Yet, when the glasses come off, she is unexpectedly straightforward...

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