I didn't recognize her from one film to the next. I wasn't really looking at Michelle Pfeiffer; I was looking at the character in the movie. The thing that really clinched it was Married to the Mob. She had a kind of honesty in the character, and she had just the right amount of humor. She wasn't putting down the character; she wasn't making a value judgment on the character. She really was like the people I grew up with. The characters were Italians from Long Island, and here was an actress of a different type, different background, coming in and making me believe totally. That really made me sit up and take note. And then, when Dangerous Liaisons came out, I thought, 'She's the best we have.'
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Martin Scorsese, director of The Age of InnocenceMichelle Pfeiffer
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Alda's best-written character in the movie probably is Faith Healy, the sexy actress played by Pfeiffer. Her performance uses some wonderfully subtle touches, as she moves back and forth between her historical character and her distinctly more cynical modern one.
Michelle Pfeiffer
It’s not a character like in a book or a movie. He’s not a bus driver. He doesn’t drive a forklift. He’s not a serial killer. It’s me who’s singing that, plain and simple. We shouldn’t confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, “My character this, and my character that.” Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don’t have to explain it to me.
Bob Dylan
I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.
Kurt Vonnegut
Did my mother know … Of course she did — and she didn't mind a bit. They had an incredibly happy marriage, but my father wasn't faithful to her for a single second.
There was scarcely a trace of jealousy in her character. She worshipped the ground he walked on, but she wasn't very highly sexed — she was quite glad that other women were taking the weight off her, as it were. I once asked her if she minded. She said: "They were the flowers, but I was the tree."Diana (Lady Diana Manners) Cooper
This is one of the movies they will use as a document, years from now, when they begin to trace the steps by which Pfeiffer became a great star. I cannot claim that I spotted her unique screen presence in her first movie, which, I think, was Grease 2, but certainly by the time she made Ladyhawke and Tequila Sunrise and Dangerous Liaisons and Married to the Mob, something was going on. This is the movie of her flowering — not just as a beautiful woman, but as an actress with the ability to make you care about her, to make you feel what she feels. All of those qualities are here in this movie, and so is the "Makin' Whoopee" number, which I can only praise by adding it to a short list: whatever she's doing while she performs that song isn't merely singing; it's whatever Rita Hayworth did in Gilda and Marilyn Monroe did in Some Like It Hot, and I didn't want her to stop.
Michelle Pfeiffer
Pfeiffer, Michelle
Phaedrus
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