Imagine that you are born a sun-kissed California blonde.
As a teenage checkout girl, you decide to become an actress. You know no one in the entertainment industry, so you enter a beauty contest to catch an agent’s eye. You win. Within a year, you are on TV in soap commercials and bombshell roles. (That’s your character’s name on one show: The Bombshell. You call her Barbara.)
The movies come — bad ones, better ones. There are million-dollar paychecks, magazine covers, award nominations. You step away, for years at a time, to care for your young family. A decade goes by. Then two. You are a grandmother now, but still beloved, still desired. And the roles, the ones you choose with care, are still rich. Now you can relax, confident in your talent, your success.
Unless you are Michelle Pfeiffer. At 67, she is busier than ever, a movie queen lately reinvented as a small-screen star. She is also as unsettled as ever about her relationship to her work and how she goes about it.
Pfeiffer has not participated substantively an ongoing series since the 1970s, but this spring she has two: “The Madison,” a lachrymose Taylor Sheridan drama that premieres on Saturday on Paramount+; and “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” a screwy, sweet-hearted dramedy that debuts on April 15 on Apple TV. Both showcase an actress in expert command of her powers. Both prompted her typical unease.
“I always go into a part with some trepidation, because I never quite know how I’m going to go about it,” she said over lunch. She sounded mildly regretful. “I’d love to be able to skate through some of these things.”
Skating is not in her repertory. “That’s why she is the actress that she is,” said Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed all of “The Madison.” “She has never sat back in any role in her career.”
Nearly five decades into that career, Pfeiffer is trying, falteringly, to learn different habits: to let go a little more, to vanish into her roles a little less, to resist an inclination to obsess.
“That’s not healthy,” she said. But that is all she has ever known. She seemed sincere in her desire to ease up on her perfectionism and unsure of the actress and the person she would be without it.
I met Pfeiffer on a cloudless February day at an unassuming Santa Monica restaurant. The restaurant’s interior was cool and otherwise deserted, which meant she could enjoy the relative anonymity she prefers. It had taken my eyes a little while to adjust to the dimness and longer to adjust to Pfeiffer, who has the kind of prettiness that makes a person dazed and squinty. I might as well have gone back outside and stared up at the sun.
Pfeiffer has never been comfortable in trading on her beauty. She isn’t comfortable with press either. She tolerates interviews better than she used to, especially those for her fragrance company, Henry Rose. But talking about her work to a stranger is a very mild form of torture.
“It’s emotional,” she said. “I start to feel anxious about it, the exposure.”
During the meal, she was never less than gracious, sharing her vegetable sides, answering questions with what felt like real honesty. She was also palpably shy. I felt protective of her, even as I was aware that a star like her — a star who has played Catwoman! — does not need protecting. I’d never sat across from someone in whom such strength and such fragility collided.
If beauty (incontestable unless you are Pfeiffer, who has described her face as ducklike) explains some of the fascination she exerts onscreen, even more compelling is the emotive tension she brings to many of her characters, who feel deeply even as they try to protect and withhold those feelings. Acting began early for her. As a child in what she called “an unpredictable household,” she play-acted her personality, behaving in ways that she thought would keep her safe. In many of her best performances — in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988) or “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989), say — there is a child’s watchfulness layered underneath, a child’s fear of hurt.
Her attitude toward her work has always been a dance of approach and avoidance. After those early bombshell years, she was vigilant about the parts she took. (An agent nicknamed her Dr. No.) By the 2000s, married to the prolific writer and producer David E. Kelley and a mother to two young children, she became even more careful, declining offers that would disrupt family life. She loved motherhood and was grateful for how it blunted her tendency to obsess over her work.
“It forces you out of your narcissism,” she said. “I was a much happier person when I became a mom.”
Once both children were in college, she returned more fully to acting. The offers had been there before, but many were unappealing, “evil stepmother or parts that just felt very demeaning to women,” she said. Now there were a few that felt better.
In 2017 she took her first major TV role in decades, as Ruth Madoff, the wife of the convicted financial scammer Bernie Madoff in the HBO film “The Wizard of Lies.” Several movies quickly followed.
Why return at all when she had such mixed feelings about the industry and how it treated women, particularly older women? Because even as motherhood has been a respite from work, work had been a respite, too, from the preoccupations of an overactive mind.
“It has been such a gift and got me through so many things,” she said. “I’m just better busy.”
She is very busy now, particularly in “The Madison,” which Sheridan wrote for her. “I needed a woman with a real internal strength as well as a very deep emotional well,” Sheridan wrote in an email. Pfeiffer had that.
Pfeiffer plays Stacy Clyburn, the matriarch of a wealthy Manhattan clan who decamps to Montana after a personal tragedy. Both Pfeiffer and Stacy are self-described city mice, and both benefit from long, loving marriages. But Pfeiffer had trouble with the part. She often begins by finding a thread of something in her own life that she can connect to the character. With the pampered Stacy, who learns self-sufficiency while wearing silk pajamas, she struggled to find that string.
Was she really struggling or was this her perfectionism talking? Certainly, some co-stars observed greater ease.
Beau Garrett and Elle Chapman, who play Stacy’s daughters, marveled at Pfeiffer’s naturalness in character and assuredness on set. “She has a gravitas to her,” Garrett said. “People just quiet down when she’s around.” She added that it was a privilege to be yelled at by Pfeiffer in fraught family scenes. This was echoed by Chapman.
“She has a gaze that can completely level you,” she said admiringly.
But the naturalness doesn’t come naturally, or at least not entirely. Kurt Russell, who plays Stacy’s husband, previously worked with Pfeiffer on the dubious 1988 thriller “Tequila Sunrise.”
“It looks effortless, but it’s not at all effortless,” he said in an interview.
Sheridan also saw the cost. “I honestly don’t know how Michelle was able to access that level of emotion take after take, and day after day,” he said. “An actor of her talent and skill could have easily pulled any number of tricks out of her basket, but she didn’t. Not once. She forced herself to embrace the suffering.”
“The Madison” shot two six-episode seasons, about a year apart. In between, Pfeiffer shot the first season of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” based on the celebrated Rufi Thorpe novel. The show is about a young woman, Margo (Elle Fanning), who becomes unexpectedly pregnant and then supports herself as a cam girl. Pfeiffer plays Shyanne, Margo’s mother, a former Hooters waitress now engaged to a youth minister.
Kelley created the series. It is Pfeiffer’s first meaningful collaboration with him since she played a part in his 1996 film “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday.”
This was by choice. When they were first married, in 1993, appearing on a TV series, Kelley’s typical domain, would have been a career embarrassment. Besides, Pfeiffer said, “When I come home from work and I’ve had a bad day, I want him to be on my side. I want to him to believe my version.” That trumped co-working.
But television is no longer the comedown it used to be. And when Kelley read the novel, he knew that for Shyanne he needed an actress who could be both despicable and lovable, who could credibly say a line like “I’m just terrible at everything except being pretty,” who could command sympathy even as she repelled it.
“I really just couldn’t see anyone else but her playing Shyanne,” Kelley said in an interview.
In the book, Shyanne appears only briefly, so Pfeiffer agreed, not knowing that the role would be expanded to include scenes of department-store humiliation and bachelorette-party high jinks. If she wrestled with Stacy’s elegance on “The Madison,” Shyanne’s pleather and grit were closer to hand. Pfeiffer, who grew up in Orange County, not far from where Shyanne lives, had known plenty of people like her, strivers who were dealt lousy hands and played them the best they could.
“It didn’t take a lot for me to step into those shoes,” Pfeiffer said.
Fanning, who first worked with Pfeiffer on the 2001 weepie “I Am Sam,” marveled at the “astounding balance of fight and vulnerability” that Pfeiffer brought to the role, as well as a gift for spontaneity. “When you watch Michelle, you never know which way she’s going to play it,” Fanning wrote in an email.
Pfeiffer feels good about these recent shows — as good as she allows herself to feel, at least. (And Kelley confirmed that so far their marriage has survived.) She has always disappeared into her roles, but this time, because she was going back and forth between projects and taking time out to visit her husband and her daughter and granddaughter, she couldn’t do her usual vanishing act. She doesn’t think the work has suffered.
“If you’re going to survive, you’re going have to figure out a way to do this and enjoy your life and not disappear,” she said. She sounded confident. This was toward the end of the interview, and she had exposed herself enough. A few minutes later she slipped away into the restaurant’s shadows and then back out into the sun.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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