“I left with my tail between my legs, feeling so humiliated.” That is how Michelle Pfeiffer remembers walking out of her audition for Grease 2.
She told Entertainment Weekly for a 2023 oral history of the film, which reached theaters in June 1982, that she expected nothing from the day. Her agent sent her, she said, “just for the experience.” The role was Stephanie Zinone, leader of the Pink Ladies.
The waiting room was chaos. “It was such a cattle call,” Pfeiffer said, with actors, dancers and singers coming and going through very thin walls. Everyone waiting could hear your reading and your singing. She was not a singer and was taking voice classes at her acting coach’s urging. “And I certainly was not a dancer.”
Last line, lost steps
The dance round came last. Groups crossed the stage in lines, one after another, the way it looks in the movies. Pfeiffer kept drifting backward until she was in the very last line. She stumbled through it because she could not remember the choreography.
Then a surprise. Someone’s assistant, Pfeiffer thinks it was director Pat Birch’s, ran after her across the Paramount lot. Pfeiffer mumbled something about being embarrassed. “Well, you shouldn’t be,” the assistant told her, “because she wants you to come back tomorrow.”
She got the part. The cast around her included Maxwell Caulfield, Lorna Luft, Pamela Adlon, Christopher McDonald and Didi Conn. Critics were unkind to the film, but audiences have stayed loyal and still turn out for screenings.
Before it, Pfeiffer had worked on television in CHiPS and Fantasy Island, appeared in Hollywood Knights, and starred in the TV movie Splendor in the Grass. After it came Scarface, then three straight Oscar 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 in Taylor Sheridan’s The Madison.
Sources
- Why Michelle Pfeiffer left her “Grease 2” audition feeling 'so humiliated' – AOL
- Michelle Pfeiffer says she felt 'humiliated' following her audition for her breakthrough role in 'Grease 2'
