Pfandom: Cool Rider and a Pink (Leading) Lady

on the set of Grease 2, her first lead roleP F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 8 
by Nathaniel R 

We've mostly focused on Michelle Pfeiffer's acting in our Pfandom retrospective. We're sure the star who has described herself as "extremely private" would like it that way, but this would be the appropriate time for a brief bit of personal context.

Though the young actress had been working nonstop since the late 70s in television roles and a few features, she'd been struggling offscreen. She was impatient with the way her career was developing. She'd also become involved with a cult, an experience she's always been cagey about in interviews. She had given them too much of her money and was eating strangely at their insistence. In 1981, she took back control of her life.

At the Grease 2 premiere in NYC with her new husband Peter Horton and producer Allan Carr

Two marriages and two divorces (of sorts): in her personal life she fell in love with fellow up-and-coming actor Peter Horton (who would later become a TV star on thirtysomething), and broke free from the cult; in her professional life she dumped her first agent to sign with the much more powerful William Morris Agency. The shakeup had an immediate effect on her career...

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75 days until Michelle Pfeiffer returns to us...

Important dates in the RePfeiffal of 2017...

Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff in "Wizard of Lies"

April 29th Michelle Pfeiffer's birthday. She turns 59
May 20th The HBO premiere of Wizard of Lies starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro in a TV movie about the Madoff scandal
June 19th 25th anniversary of Batman Returns (1992)
And Every Saturday ...new episodes of Pfandom
Sept 17th Emmy Night - will she be a nominee for Wizard of Lies? It premieres just before the Emmy eligibility cutoff
Oct 13th Darren Aronofsky's Mother opens in movie theaters starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, and Domnhall Gleeson
Nov 22nd The all star remake of Murder on the Orient Express opens in movie theaters starring Michelle Pfeiffer (in the Lauren Bacall role), Kenneth Branagh (in the Albert Finney role), Judi Dench (in the Wendy Hiller role), Daisy Ridley (in the Vanessa Redgrave role), Olivia Colman (in the Rachel Roberts role),  Johnny Depp (in the Richard Widmark role) and Penélope Cruz (in the Ingrid Bergman role). The original was nominated for 6 Oscars in 1974, including two for acting: Bergman and Finney. How will the remake fare with critics and the Academy? 
Dec 11th 25th anniversary of Love Field (1992) which was unfortunately Pfeiffer's last Oscar nomination
Dec 25th Who cares. Santa comes way early in 2017 with the best gift: Bringing La Pfeiffer back 

and...

Michelle's last Oscars appearance. Pictured with Julianne Moore & Kate Winslet backstage which is too much actress bliss for one photo

March 4th, 2018 The 90th Academy Awards. Cross your fingers for Pfeiffer as nominee, or at least presenter. Her last Oscar appearance was singing Jeff Bridges praises for the Best Actor presentation for Crazy Heart (2009)

No Date Yet The Sundance drama Where is Kyra? has no concrete release plans yet :( 

Pfandom: "Falling in Love Again" and "...Dragon Queen"

Pfeiffer instantly sentimentalized, with a halo no less, in her first scene in "Falling in Love Again"P F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 7 
by Nathaniel R 

There are an infinite number of worse people to grow up to look like than British star Susannah York but somehow it's hard to buy that that's who Michelle Pfeiffer would become. Pfeiffer was still a pre-teen when Susannah York hit her career peak, most notably in a string of erotically charged and sometimes controversial 1960s movies like Tom Jones, The Killing of Sister George, X Y and Zee, and They Shoot Horses Don't They (the latter brought her her only, but well deserved, Oscar nomination). By the time Pfeiffer was hitting the movies and cast to play York as a young girl, York's star was fading. York had recently been reduced to a merely decorative alien maternal presence in Superman (1978) and now a young actress was playing the idealized version of her. Hollywood can be cruel that way.

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Pfandom: Troubled Boys & Spurned Girls

P F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 6 
by Nathaniel R 

Pfeiffer is a hormonally charged pflapper in the remake of Splendor in the Grass

[Editor's Note: Due to a scheduling issue with DVDs and a two day internet outage at your host's home last week we're a bit out of sequence & behind. Apologies]

Last week we got an early glimpse of Michelle Pfeiffer's bad girl side with the campy plodding Texas melodrama Callie & Son (1981). It was one of three telefilms the young actress co-starred in the year before her first leading movie role (Grease 2). Her last two TV movies before stardom make a fascinating double feature for their good girl/bad girl dichotomy and their foreshadowing of more famous roles...

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Pfandom: She's Trashy! She's Trouble! Pfeiffer in "Callie & Son"

P F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 5 
by Nathaniel R 

Michelle Pfeiffer is big trouble in "Callie & Son"

It wasn't initially clear, as it rarely is for new working actors, where Michelle Pfeiffer's place in the Hollywood ecosystem would be. The first three years of her career (1979-1981) were a mish-mash as if her management was throwing her at everything just to see what would stick. In the first three years of professional acting career she made four TV movies, three feature films, had two series regular gigs, and snuck in a few guest spots. The roles were far from stellar but she was working, a lot and was famously a quick study. Callie & Son, an absolutely ridiculous CBS melodrama from October 1981, gave her her showiest pre-Grease 2 role. And her campiest. She wasn't the star. Lindsay Wagner was a TV superstar at the time (The Bionic Woman, Scruples) and plays Callie from teenage years to 40something. In fact, Pfeiffer is so low on the totem pole that her name is even mispelled in the credits (missing one "l"). But the acting is newly confident and fluid. It's ripe, sure, but that suits this character. In short, you can now see the great lyrical star actress that's just around the career bend.

When Pfeiffer arrives the plodding and plotty telefilm gets a badly needed jolt of energy. The PR department noticed and pushed her presence with the following very false advertisement...

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