Orlando Sentinel: Michelle Pfeiffer wears her years with pride in 'Cheri'

By Roger Moore
Orlando Sentinel
Excerpt
June 17, 2009

Conjure up the ideal screen role for a famed film beauty, a woman now "of a certain age," and she would almost certainly be the spitting image of Léa de Lonval, aging courtesan in love with a callow, gorgeous young wastrel. The heroine of Colette's novel Chéri seems tailor-made for Michelle Pfeiffer, one of the screen's leading sex symbols of the '80s and '90s.

It's a take-stock sort of role. Partly because it's a film "about aging and double-standards," Pfeiffer says. She's experiencing a bit of that in the midst of what she doesn't like to call her "comeback," a return to films that began with Hairspray and Stardust in the summer of 2007. As she turned 50 (she's 51 now), she found that while there might be roles out there for her, her name above the title didn't guarantee a film's success, something Hollywood figured out quickly. Hairspray was a hit, Stardust wasn't. I Could Never Be Your Woman barely got released, nor did this year's Personal Effects.

"Courtesan [prostitute]or actress, you're making your living off your appeal to others," she says. That's an awkward thing to have to acknowledge, however delicately, in one's 50s...

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