“I left with my tail between my legs, feeling so humiliated,” Michelle Pfeiffer says of the day she auditioned for “Grease 2.” She told Entertainment Weekly that she went in with “zero expectations of landing this part.” Her agents had sent her “just for the experience.”
It was, she said, a cattle call. Actors, dancers and singers milled around, and the walls were thin. “All the other actors waiting to go in could hear your reading, could hear your singing,” Pfeiffer said. “I was not a singer. I was taking voice classes to really improve my stage voice at the recommendation of my acting coach. And I certainly was not a dancer.”
The dance portion was the worst. Applicants formed lines and took turns performing in the front row, the way it looks in the movies. Pfeiffer, short on confidence, kept drifting backward until she was in the last row. She stumbled through because she could not remember the choreography.
Then came the surprise. Someone’s assistant, Pfeiffer thinks it was director Pat Birch’s, chased her across the Paramount studio lot. Pfeiffer said she mentioned being embarrassed. “Well, you shouldn’t be,” the assistant replied, “because she wants you to come back tomorrow.”
She got the lead. In the 1982 film she played Stephanie Zinone, head of the Pink Ladies. Where the first movie had a good girl fall for a bad boy, the sequel flipped it, and Pfeiffer played the bad girl who falls for a good boy. Fans of the film still remember her performance of “Cool Rider.”
After Grease 2
Bigger roles followed, including “Scarface” opposite Al Pacino. She earned three straight Academy Award nominations, for “Married to the Mob,” “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Fabulous Baker Boys.” Pfeiffer, 68, has more recently appeared in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” and Taylor Sheridan’s “The Madison.”
She told The Hollywood Reporter in March that she and Sheridan went back and forth over her character, Stacy, before she signed on. “I wasn’t going to win this battle,” she said. So she asked Helen Mirren, who starred in Sheridan’s “1923,” about the experience. “She just glowed; she couldn’t say enough nice things,” Pfeiffer recalled. “So I took a big leap of faith, and I committed.”
