Michelle Marie Pfeiffer (born April 29, 1958) is an American actress.
Pfeiffer was born in Santa Ana, California, the second of four children born to Richard Pfeiffer, a heating and air-conditioning contractor, and Donna, a homemaker; she has one elder brother, Rick, and two younger sisters, Dedee Pfeiffer and Lori Pfeiffer, both actresses.
The family moved to Midway City, California, where Pfeiffer spent her childhood. She attended Fountain Valley High School and worked as a check-out girl at Vons supermarket. After a short stint training to be a court stenographer, she decided upon an acting career, and entered the Miss Orange County beauty pageant in 1978, and the Miss Los Angeles contest later that year, after which she was signed by a Hollywood agent who appeared on the judging panel. Moving to Los Angeles, she began to audition for commercials and bit parts in films.
Pfeiffer's early acting appearances included television roles in Fantasy Island, Delta House and BAD Cats, and small film roles in Falling in Love Again with Susannah York, The Hollywood Knights opposite Tony Danza, and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, none of which met with much success. Pfeiffer took acting lessons, and appeared in three further television movies - Callie and Son with Lindsay Wagner, The Children Nobody Wanted, and a remake of Splendor in the Grass - before landing her first major film role as Stephanie Zinone in Grease 2, the sequel to the smash-hit musical Grease. The film was a critical and commercial failure, although Pfeiffer herself received some positive attention, notably from the New York Times, which said "although she is a relative screen newcomer, Miss Pfeiffer manages to look much more insouciant and comfortable than anyone else in the cast." Despite escaping the critical mauling, Pfeiffer's agent later admitted that her association with the film meant that "she couldn't get any jobs. Nobody wanted to hire her." Director Brian de Palma, having seen Grease 2, refused to audition Pfeiffer for Scarface (1983), but relented upon the producer's insistence. During her screen test, Pfeiffer accidentally cut leading man Al Pacino with broken glass, after which she subsequently won the role of cocaine-addicted trophy wife Elvira Hancock. The film was considered excessively violent by most critics, but became a commercial hit and gained a large cult following in subsequent years.
Pfeiffer also lent her vocal talents to two animated films during this period, voicing Tzipporah in The Prince of Egypt, in which she introduced the Academy Award-winning song, 'When You Believe', and Eris in Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.
After a four-year hiatus, during which she remained largely out of the public eye and devoted time to her husband and children, Pfeiffer returned to the screen in 2007 with villainous roles in two major summer blockbusters, as Velma von Tussle in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Hairspray with John Travolta and Christopher Walken, and as ancient witch Lamia in fantasy adventure Stardust opposite Claire Danes and Robert de Niro.
Pfeiffer's recent projects have included the roles of Rosie in Amy Heckerling's I Could Never Be Your Woman with Paul Rudd and Saoirse Ronan, and Linda in Personal Effects opposite Ashton Kutcher. She recently completed filming Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Colette's Chéri, playing the role of Léa de Lonval opposite Rupert Friend and Kathy Bates. The film was directed by Stephen Frears, who worked with Pfeiffer and Hampton on 1988's Dangerous Liaisons.
In 1989, Pfeiffer made her stage début in the role of Olivia in Twelfth Night, a New York Shakespeare Festival production staged in Central Park. Other well-known film actors involved in the play included Pfeiffer's former co-stars Jeff Goldblum as Malvolio and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Viola. Frank Rich's review in the New York Times was extremely negative on all aspects of the production, though his criticism of Pfeiffer's performance was directed more at those who cast her: "Ms. Pfeiffer offers an object lesson in how gifted stars with young careers can be misused by those more interested in exploiting their celebrity status than in furthering their artistic development." Rich went on to praise Pfeiffer's performance in what was then her most recent film, the screwball comedy Married to the Mob, before lamenting it as "unfortunate that the actress has been asked to make both her stage and Shakespearean comic début in a role chained to melancholy and mourning." To date, the part of Olivia has marked Pfeiffer's only appearance on stage.
At the start of her career, Pfeiffer met Peter Horton at an acting class taught by Milton Katselas in Los Angeles. They married in Santa Monica when Pfeiffer was 22, and it was on their honeymoon that she discovered she had won the lead role in Grease 2. Horton directed Pfeiffer in a 1985 ABC TV special, One Too Many, in which she played the high school girlfriend of an alcoholic student; and in 1987, the real-life couple then played an on-screen couple in the 'Hospital' segment of John Landis's comedy skit compilation, Amazon Women on the Moon. However, they decided to separate in 1988, and were divorced two years later; Horton later blamed the split on their devotion to their work rather than their marriage.
In 1993, Pfeiffer was set up on a blind date with television writer and producer David E. Kelley, but it became a group event and they barely spoke to each other. The following week, Kelley took her to the movies to see Bram Stoker's Dracula, and they began dating seriously. They married on November 13, 1993. Since then, she has made an uncredited cameo appearance in one episode of Kelley's television series, Picket Fences, and played the titular character in To Gillian On Her 37th Birthday, for which Kelley wrote the screenplay.
In between her marriages to Horton and Kelley, Pfeiffer had a three-year relationship with Fisher Stevens. They met when Pfeiffer was starring in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night, in which Stevens had the part of Sir Andrew Aguecheek. She has also been romantically linked to some of her male co-stars, including John Malkovich, Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer.
Pfeiffer and Kelley have two children, one adopted daughter and one biological son. Pfeiffer, who was by her own admission desperate to start a family, had entered into private adoption proceedings before she even met Kelley. The biracial baby girl she adopted had been born in March 1993, to a young nurse in New York who could not afford to support all of her children; she was christened Claudia Rose in November 1993, on the same day that Pfeiffer and Kelley were married. Pfeiffer immediately became pregnant, and in August 1994, gave birth to a son, John Henry.