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“White Oleander” Interview: Michelle Pfeiffer

Even sans makeup, wearing a simple blouse draped over jeans, there is an undeniable flawlessness to Michelle Pfeiffer‘s physicality that makes her every bit the movie star.

Flawless as she may seem offscreen, on-screen the actress has taken on a gallery of flawed characters–though none so much as her latest, the fiercely beautiful and manipulative mother in White Oleander.

In the film version of the best-selling novel by Janet Fitch, Pfeiffer plays Ingrid Magnussen, a feminist poet who poisons her ex-boyfriend in a fit of passion and ends up in prison, forcing her teenage daughter Astrid (Alison Lohman) to live in a series of foster homes. Astrid must deal with very different foster mothers (played by Renee Zellweger and Robin Wright-Penn) while coming of age, and when the opportunity arises to have her mother back, she must make some difficult choices.

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Pfeiffer‘s character is consistently unsympathetic, and the actress admits the role was one of the toughest challenges she’s had yet in her career. “It was liberating to play somebody that it didn’t matter how sympathetic she was,” she says. “However destructive, narcissistic, selfish and annihilating she might be, she is also very truthful and relentlessly steadfast in her beliefs and willing to pay the price for that. Ultimately her behavior is out of fear of being vulnerable and having to be totally and utterly in control.”

Pfeiffer is outspoken about tackling the role of a fiercely independent, outspoken woman who uses her own beauty as a weapon, but when it comes to the pros and cons of being a beautiful actress in today’s Hollywood, the actress is reticent. It is a double-edged sword, she says, choosing her words carefully. “I feel like it is a no-win conversation, because no matter what I say I am going to sound like a jerk.”

She pauses, realizing that there is a strange parallel between the theme of her latest film and the real-life perception of one of Hollywood’s most luminous stars, and slowly admits that beauty “can also be blinding, but like everything it has its advantages and disadvantages.”

A working actress since making her professional acting debut in 1979, Pfeiffer has fought hard against being stereotyped as the glamorous beauty and proven her diversity through work as distinctive as Scarface, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Russia House, Dangerous Minds and last year’s I Am Sam.

She admits her own vulnerability has to do with not only the power of her good looks, but also with her status as Hollywood celebrity. Always uncomfortable in the spotlight, she says that she gets more and more used to it, but “the whole celebrity thing never is normal and I think the fuller your life is, the more you are able to just kind of call a truce with it on a good day.”

Yet now, at 44 and some 40 films later, Pfeiffer is enjoying her profession more now than ever, because, she says, she doesn’t need it as much now as she once did. “I guess it is like, when you are younger and you are kind of desperate, you need approval, you NEED to work and you HAVE to work.

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“Early on my identity was so wrapped up,” she continues. “When I wasn’t working I didn’t know what to do with myself and sort of didn’t exist, in a way, when I wasn’t working, so I was like two different people. I am not like that anymore…[I] enjoy the work in a much less desperate way.”

After all Pfeiffer‘s figured out about this acting thing, she remains divided as to her children pursuing an acting career. “I definitely won’t let them do it when they’re children,” she affirms, adding, “but the same time sometimes I say to myself: My life is so much better than it would have been had I not become an actor, so what is it that you are so resistant to? I guess I sort of just feel like I am lucky.”

And with her career going strong, Michelle‘s luck, it seems, isn’t likely to run out any time soon.

White Oleander opens Oct. 11.

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