Michelle Pfeiffer Still Learning Onscreen

ByABC News via logo
January 22, 2002, 9:33 PM

Jan. 23 -- She played a sultry lounge singer in The Fabulous Baker Boys, a gum-smacking Mafia wife in Married to the Mob and the purring feline Catwoman in Batman Returns.

Michelle Pfeiffer is a chameleon as much as she is a superstar.

And her latest screen identity in the new drama I Am Sam proves it again. She plays a high-powered, highly stressed corporate lawyer defending a mentally challenged man, played by Sean Penn.

The two are locked in a desperate custody battle that at least on screen she doesn't think he should win. But off-screen, it taught her a lot about herself.

"I was really faced with prejudices that I didn't really know that I had, and, and I think like most people I just never really stopped to think about it,"Pfeiffer told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. "I realized that as a child, most children are really just brought up, and the only thing that's really ever said about mentally challenged people is 'Don't stare.' And so they go through life either being gawked at, or being invisible, and, and I realized I had fear."

A Reformed Type A

The theme of disability, that we all have limitations might not seem like it, would come naturally to Pfeiffer. After all, her life seems perfect. She has a famous husband, writer-producer David E. Kelley, and two healthy children, Claudia Rose and John Henry. So it is refreshing to note that she feels like a klutz about as often as everyone else, as her children can attest.

"I'm not good at street hockey," she said. "I'm really good at doing artsy-craftsy things [with my kids]."

There are still things that really scare her about being a mom.

"I think my daughter really sort of summed it one day when I was putting her ponytail and I had to redo it because it was crooked, and she said, 'Mom, it's really important to you that my ponytail is straight,' " Pfeiffer said.

At that point, she realized that as a parent she had to let go of her type A personality, put down all the parenting books, and let things go astray be it a ponytail, or the day's events.