Tragic Details About Michelle Pfeiffer's Life

Tragedy is hardly the word that comes to mind when Michelle Pfeiffer is mentioned. The award-winning actor — tied to the tall legacies of films like "Scarface" and "Married to the Mob" — seems to have had a pretty smooth journey during her decades-long career in Hollywood. Not to mention, she has enjoyed attention as one of the industry's most ethereal beauties. But while her top-grade filmography and dazzling looks might make it hard to immediately see it, the actor has been through her own fair share of pain in life. 

From dealing with the pressures of fame as a media-shy celebrity, to breaking out of the sexist standards the industry set for her — Pfeiffer has charted a complicated relationship with her status as an actor, all while navigating personal losses, feelings of inadequacy, and advancing age. "I'm always afraid of failing," she told The New York Times in 2017. While it doesn't fully explain her periodic absence from the industry, her struggle with stardom does paint her as a complex figure whose layers run deep. Here are tragic details about Michelle Pfeiffer's life. 

There was a time, long before she cultivated her poised Hollywood persona, when Michelle Pfeiffer was getting up to all kinds of recklessness. By her own admission, the star didn't exactly have the most smooth-sailing youth, growing up in Orange County as a child who often got into trouble at school. "I was like the Mafia don of my elementary school," she told The Hollywood Reporter, recalling how she gave as good as she got from bullies who teased her about her appearance. 

Growing up in the freewheeling acid-laced era of the 1960s and '70s, Pfeiffer presumably had much scope to experiment with an unconventional lifestyle — which she seemingly tapped into. "I wasn't ever where I was supposed to be, and I didn't do what I was told. I was in trouble a lot," she told The Sunday Times, without going into the details of the drugs she tried or her life in the fast lane. 

Pfeiffer has, however, opened up on multiple occasions about a particularly taxing period from her youth, around the time she was just starting out in the entertainment industry. The actor got in with what she described as a cult, at the helm of which was a couple from Los Angeles who dominated her early 20s — taking money from her and preaching radical routines — before she was able to cut them off. "There was a lot of mind-f***ing and brainwashing," she said. 

Michelle Pfeiffer came waltzing into showbiz in the 1970s with so much oomph that she landed a recurring role on the television sitcom "Delta House" as a character literally called the Bombshell. Unsurprisingly, high sex appeal was a defining quality of the blonde-haired character and turned Pfeiffer, much like Bombshell, into a fantasy for viewers of the show. But for the young star, who was only just starting out in acting, to be restricted in a role that spotlighted little more than her physicality presented a frustrating situation. "I used to call my agent, crying on the phone: 'They're putting me in hot pants again.' I had two sets of falsies," she told New Woman magazine in 1992. 

Another problem was that others in the industry were prompted to offer Pfeiffer roles in a similar vein — or, to reiterate her own expression, roles that typecast her as a bimbo. "I was very careful about when I had the option of actually choosing, because sometimes you just have to pay the rent," she told The New Yorker, adding that she tried to pull off a balancing act by never letting meatier roles pass her by. Things began turning after "Grease 2" when, encouraged by her then husband Peter Horton, Pfeiffer came round to her worth beyond the siren roles she was being pigeonholed into. "Scarface" followed in 1983 and the rest, as the cliche goes, is history. 

The cinematic significance of "Scarface," Brian De Palma's 1983 violent masterpiece, cannot be overstated. But while the classic's legacy as one of the best gangster films ever made is typically recalled in reference to Al Pacino's smashing lead performance as Tony Montana, it's hard to gloss over what Michelle Pfeiffer brought to the film in her breakthrough role as his wife, Elvira Hancock. 

She carried the glam tragedy of her cocaine-fueled character with such finesse that it was nearly impossible to tell just how much of a toll the film took on her behind the scenes. "I would go to bed every night crying," Pfeiffer told The Hollywood Reporter, recalling the inadequacy she felt amidst her more experienced co-stars and how she was "just waiting to be fired the whole time." 

As a naive 20-something up-and-comer, Pfeiffer was not well-equipped to navigate the dark persona Elvira demanded and so, as she told The Guardian, drew from the wisdom of her crew to build the character. "I really relied on the women around me, my makeup artist and my hairdresser, people who had had more life experience, to tell me who she was." Pfeiffer threw herself headfirst into the role, revealing during a panel at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival that she survived off "tomato soup and Marlboros," and eventually ended up starving herself as the shoot schedules wore on. 

In the wake of Hollywood's #MeToo movement, Michelle Pfeiffer came forward to introspect some of her own experiences from the past that had left a bad aftertaste in her mouth. "There's that process you go through — denial, self-blame, 'I shouldn't have worn that dress,' 'I should've known,'" she told The Sunday Times, reflecting on her naïveté as a young star navigating a thorny industry. Without divulging too many details, the "Dangerous Liaisons" actor recalled one incident in particular that had involved her 20-year-old self and a man with powerful authority in the business. "I was really uncomfortable and it was inappropriate," she said. 

In her over 40-year career that involved collaborations with some of the biggest main players in Hollywood, Pfeiffer never worked with producer Harvey Weinstein, who was named and convicted as one of the key offenders in Hollywood's #MeToo saga. The revelations that came out seemingly left her shocked over how "systemic" the issue was, she said on "Sunday Today," with women around her all having one or another story to share. These experiences didn't see the light of day when she was at the peak of her career because the showbiz culture then allowed little room for this conversation. "You just didn't talk about it," she said. "There's so much shame involved in it." 

In an industry where physical appearances foreground much else, the idea that a star's good looks can prove to be a hindrance may seem inconceivable. But Michelle Pfeiffer has stood on this edge for most of her career in Hollywood, where her legacy is bound as tightly to her physical beauty as it is to her acting talent — if not more. As Jonathan Demme, who directed Pfeiffer in "Married to the Mob," told Premiere magazine back in 1988, "I think that more than any other quote-unquote beautiful actress, Michelle has been handicapped by her appearance." 

Though Pfeiffer managed to challenge this limiting perception by proving her brilliance as an award-winning character actor, she couldn't completely shake it off. As Paul Rudd, Pfeiffer's co-star in "I Could Never Be Your Woman" and the "Ant-Man" series, reiterated to The Hollywood Reporter in 2022, "She's so beautiful that people forget how talented she is." He went on to say that even the A-listers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were intimidated by her.

While it was essentially a beauty pageant that kickstarted Pfeiffer's showbiz career, the actor has worked hard to mold her image beyond aesthetics. It's not as if she is completely removed from the beauty discourse that surrounds her – but her acknowledgment has always come with a pinch of salt. She explained to The New Yorker, "No matter how you answer those questions it doesn't come off well." 

Even a silver screen legend who has been nominated for three Oscars and endless other awards like Michelle Pfeiffer isn't immune to second-guessing herself. Pfeiffer has even said that she's embarrassed of most of her movie roles, and she's admitted to feeling like an imposter when it comes to her craft. Much of this she has linked to her early years in acting, when she found herself thrown into the deep end with people who seemed better equipped than her. 

"I didn't have any formal training. I didn't come from Juilliard," she told director Darren Aronofsky for Interview magazine. "So I've always had this feeling that one day they're going to find out that I'm really a fraud, that I really don't know what I'm doing." This insecurity seemingly sheds some light on Pfeiffer's ambiguous relationship with acting, as well as her discomfort with revealing herself in interviews — "the worst interviewee that ever was," she called herself. 

Though a lot of Pfeiffer's anxiety was rooted in her days as a Hollywood newbie — "I spent years wasting time being afraid," she told The Sunday Times — and she claims to have settled into it with age, she continues to be unabashedly guarded in her interviews for fear of letting too much of herself show. 

Michelle Pfeiffer's screen performances have never betrayed the discomfort that went into bringing some of her roles to life. From suffocating costumes to long hours in the makeup chair, down to the unpleasant constitution of the characters, there's a lot Pfeiffer has had to assent to. Her iconic Catwoman bodysuit in "Batman Returns" that transformed her into a leather-clad sex symbol for generations to come, for instance, is something she doesn't want to cross paths with ever again. And the elaborate witchy prosthetics that covered her face in "Stardust" weren't any easier to deal with: "My face was completely encapsulated; it was just so claustrophobic. It was maybe the most uncomfortable I've ever been," she told The New York Times.

Pfeiffer's prerequisite as an actor has been straightforward: she should connect to the character she is playing. While she is no stranger to exploring the whole range of human temperament (including villainy) on screen, it proved difficult for her to reckon with the grayness of her characters on occasion — such as with her part as the manipulative Ingrid in "White Oleander," which she found hard to relate to. "I remember counting the days that I didn't have to be in [her] skin," she said in the NYT. Stepping into the shoes of a bigoted media honcho for "Hairspray" was another challenge. As director Adam Shankman told People, "Michelle was very on edge about playing somebody so blatantly racist."

It's been years since Michelle Pfeiffer lost her parents but it seems that the pain has understandably not subsided for the screen icon, who reminisces about them from time to time on social media. As she wrote in a touching Instagram post for her mother Donna Jean Pfeiffer, who died in 2018, "You left us so long ago and how is it possible that I miss you more with each new year that passes? That's the way love is." While the camera-shy star has avoided divulging too much about her domestic life, she did once share that her mother had advanced-stage dementia. 

Her father Richard Pfeiffer, meanwhile, seemed to have been a significant presence in her life before he died of cancer back in 1998. The "Wolf" star has spoken fondly about the values and support she drew from her father, telling The Sunday Times, "Well, he used to say to me, 'No matter what you do, do it to the best of your ability.'" Besides the emotional toll her parents' health took on her, it also prompted Michelle to reckon with her own wellness. As she told the Ladies' Home Journal in 2013, "Seeing both of my parents suffer has made me think a lot about longevity and quality of life" (via UPI).

In recent years, Michelle Pfeiffer has opened up about living with a disease that affects her hands. The star was born with Dupuytren's contracture, a condition that causes the skin in one's palm and fingers to thicken and therefore, affect motor function. Among the most noticeable features of this disease is deformed fingers that turn inward toward the palm, as the skin tissue pulls on it. 

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, the precise reason behind Dupuytren's affecting people is not known but — as Pfeiffer also said in an Instagram video — can be genetic. Giving fans a glimpse into how the condition affects her daily activities, she slipped on a pair of specialized gloves before beginning her workout, which was already impeded by a back injury. "Lucky me, I have that, so I have to be careful with weights," she remarked in the 2022 social media clip. In fact, beyond Dupuytren's, Pfeiffer is seemingly prone to accidents, incurring consecutive injuries at one point in 2019 after taking multiple falls in the bathroom, The Sunday Times noted.

The public lifestyle that comes with being a celebrity — and one of Hollywood's most renowned ones at that — is something that never appealed to Michelle Pfeiffer. However, given the overwhelming fame she amassed in the 1980s, she had to learn how to deal with it quickly. "And suddenly everybody knew who I was, and it terrified me," she told The Hollywood Reporter, which also cited Michelle's decades-old reflections about whether or not all the invasive attention coming her way was worth it. 

Things took a way more unfavorable turn when Michelle became a mother and the press attention that dogged her everywhere began touching her two children's lives. "There were cameras right in their little faces, and it traumatized them," she said. In fact, when Claudia Rose Pfeiffer and John Henry Kelley were still little, Michelle stepped away from the blinding lights of cinema and paparazzi, to raise them in more private domestic settings in Northern California with her husband David E. Kelley. 

"That was a challenge for me, adjusting to fame," Michelle told The Guardian, lamenting the trend of celebrity obsession that warrants the public documentation of stars' daily lives. "I never really got completely comfortable with it, but I am at peace with it — and that has taken me many, many years." 

Michelle Pfeiffer's disappearance from Hollywood has been hard to ignore. The movie star, who drove several culturally significant films in the 1980s, has dipped in and out of the industry since the 2000s. While reasons for this downshift largely stemmed from her decision to commit more time to her family and raising her children, there was also another — more inconceivable — idea at play: that Michelle Pfeiffer was unsuited for employment. 

"I've never lost my love for acting. I feel really at home on the movie set," she told Darron Aronofsky for Interview magazine in 2019. "And I got so picky that I was unhirable." Filmmakers found it difficult to accommodate her schedules as a mother, while Pfeiffer in turn began settling so comfortably into the quietude of a private life that rumors flew that she had retired. There came a point when she felt it was time to dip her toes back in showbiz. 

When Pfeiffer returned, albeit still sporadically, she came with a headspace to loosen up and say yes to more opportunities. "You think it's that you're being offered more interesting and better materials, when actually you just mentally want to work and are therefore less likely to pass on things," she explained to Time magazine.

To reckon with the inevitability of age as a Hollywood star — and one whose beauty has long been deemed nonpareil, at that — has not been easy for Michelle Pfeiffer. As she once put it to the Ladies' Home Journal, "Having to watch yourself age on a giant movie screen is simply not natural. It can wreak havoc on your psyche." While the actor has not been one to fixate on her looks, her status as a cinema goddess — who inaugurated People's "Most Beautiful People in the World" listing as the magazine's cover star in 1990 — has inescapably been linked to her physicality, presumably complicating the process of aging for Pfeiffer. 

Ironically, it is this maturity that has given Pfeiffer the wisdom to accept herself and grow gracefully. "Would I like to look the way I did in my early 30s? You bet, but that's not going to happen, and I don't feel the same pressure I once did to do so," she told Oprah Daily. Age has also been a great motivator in encouraging Pfeiffer to leave behind cigarettes and soda and adopt a healthier lifestyle that consists of working out and eating clean. Luckily for the world, despite her tug-of-war with age — and the slump in good roles for senior actors — Pfeiffer is not going anywhere. As she told The New York Times, "I'm never going to be one that retires."