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She may have been a Hollywood star for over 25 years, but Michelle Pfeiffer knows that experience is prized less than youth in an unforgiving business. FOCUS learns more.
In the round of publicity interviews that Michelle Pfeiffer has done for her latest film, Cheri, much has been made of her age. Once the question a lady was never expected to answer, the harsh reality of the film business means it is among the first considerations made when casting a movie.
Pfeiffer, who got an early break in Scarface in 1983, has demonstrated her acting talents across a variety of films since then, picking up Oscar nominations for her work in Love Field, The Fabulous Baker Boys and in 1989 for Dangerous Liaisons. That film, like Cheri, was directed by Stephen Frears and adapted from its French source material by Christopher Hampton.
But if age in the ensuing years has not withered her acting talents, neither has it made her any less of a head turning leading lady, so much so that she recently declared with a laugh that 50 is the new 30. But the laugh hides the bleak reality that actresses in particular are still discriminated against over their age.
"That hasn't changed that much really," she says with a sigh. "I started getting asked how I felt about ageing in Hollywood when I was 35. And I remember one of the reviews for What Lies Beneath called Harrison Ford and I - and he’s 16 years older than me - 'the middle-aged protagonists'.
"So this is not new to me but I do think there's a small transitional phase for actresses aged between 40 and 50 where you can only play the psychotic mother-in-law or the wife. Most people pick the psychotic mother-in-law because at least it's kind of interesting."
Ask Pfeiffer about her earliest acting heroes and the answer may come as a surprise
“When I was small I used to stay up very late watching television, particularly those old Bette Davies and Joan Crawford movies. I remember - I don't know how old I was - thinking 'I can do that'. Isn’t that an odd thing for a kid to think? That’s my earliest memory of wanting to be an actor, or having some feeling that I knew how to do that."
Those legendary actresses faced exactly the same pressures that Pfeiffer knows so well today. Anyone who remembers Davis's barnstorming turn in All About Eve will be aware that she was playing an actress dealing with the consequences of being on the wrong side of 40, with Davis herself being 42 years old at the time she made it.
Actors, by contrast, have found the passing years easier to deal with, working with leading ladies increasingly younger than they are as the decades pass. But hope is not lost, as Cheri casts Pfeiffer as ageing courtesan Lea de Lonval who finds herself falling in love with the son of a former colleague, the title character played by 27 year old Rupert Friend.
Set in the pre-World War One era of the Belle Epoque, this is a film that ponders a melancholic end of innocence, with Pfeiffer the ideal age to play her character. And while the last few years have seen her contribute well received work in Hairspray and Stardust, she claims that hitting her half century was no big deal.
"It just came and it went," she shrugs. "I wasn't sitting around dreading it or thinking about it all the time, but it is a big one and you are sort of entering into your second half. It is about a loss, much like what Lea goes through, saying goodbye to youth while at the same time looking at a glass half full.
"You've lived long enough so that you've had people you love die and you've had people who you love get really sick and full upon really hard times. I think you just take stock and start to really count your blessings. It starts to happen, at least for me, around this age. And that's been really liberating."
ANWAR BRETT
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