Alexa here. Nathaniel's post on stars posing as other stars brought to mind a spread in Vogue that seared my brain when I was a teenager, so much so that I tore it out and saved it. After a bit of digging in our basement, I found it: a now-famous set of photos of Michelle Pfeiffer by Herb Ritts. This shoot has her posing as six different characters, which she chose herself. "I had lists and lists compiled, and I did a lot of reading, and it all kind of boiled down to these characters," she said in the accompanying interview.
as Louise Brooks as Lulu
as Laurence from Noël Coward's Private Lives
Another series I remember were the portraits Kevyn Aucoin shot for his books Making Faces and Face Forward (see here for Calista Flockhart as Audrey, Gwyneth as James Dean). I'm no pop culture historian, but I would think that Cindy Sherman's film stills from the 70s and 80s had a heavy influence on this trend well into the 90s and beyond. But none of these spreads thrilled me as much as these of Michelle. I can only imagine how much fun they were to shoot.
See more of Michelle's characters after the jump, including Maggie the Cat!
as Kate from Taming of the Shrew 
as Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
starring in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan
as Eliza Doolittle "before" in Pygmalion
as Eliza Doolittle "after"