• Career Origins: Initial Professional Recognition Occurred Through Participation In Beauty Pageants Providing Access To Television Commercials And Recurring Acting Roles
• Screen Presence: Performances Are Defined By A Combination Of Watchfulness And Emotional Tension Originating From Childhood Experiences
• Work Ethic: Technical Approach To Acting Is Characterized By Intensive Preparation And Perfectionism Rather Than Ease Or Impromptu Execution
• Prioritizing Family: Extended Periods Of Professional Absence Were Intentionally Chosen To Maintain Focus On Child Rearing And Household Stability
• Television Expansion: Return To Major Television Projects Including The Madison And Margos Got Money Troubles Signals A Formal Shift Toward Small Screen Production
• Collaborative Dynamics: Recent Professional Partnership With Husband And Producer David E Kelley Marks A Strategic Reversal Of Previous Independent Work Policies
• Character Versatility: Portrayal Of Diverse Figures Ranges From The Stoic Matriarch Of A Wealthy Clan To A Working Class Striver In Suburban Settings
• Professional Evolution: Current Efforts Aim To Balance Demanding Performance Standards With A Desire For Increased Personal Satisfaction And Reduced Obsessive Tendencies

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By Alexis Soloski

Visuals by Amy Harrity

Reporting from an unfairly sunny Santa Monica, Calif.

• Published March 10, 2026Updated March 11, 2026

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Imagine that you are born a sun-kissed California blonde.

As a teenage checkout girl, you decide to become an actress. You know no one in the entertainment industry, so you enter a beauty contest to catch an agent’s eye. You win. Within a year, you are on TV in soap commercials and bombshell roles. (That’s your character’s name on one show: The Bombshell. You call her Barbara.)

The movies come — bad ones, better ones. There are million-dollar paychecks, magazine covers, award nominations. You step away, for years at a time, to care for your young family. A decade goes by. Then two. You are a grandmother now, but still beloved, still desired. And the roles, the ones you choose with care, are still rich. Now you can relax, confident in your talent, your success.

Unless you are Michelle Pfeiffer. At 67, she is busier than ever, a movie queen lately reinvented as a small-screen star. She is also as unsettled as ever about her relationship to her work and how she goes about it.

Pfeiffer has not participated substantively in an ongoing series since the 1970s, but this spring she has two: “The Madison,” a lachrymose Taylor Sheridan drama that premieres on Saturday on Paramount+; and “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” a screwy, sweet-hearted dramedy that debuts on April 15 on Apple TV. Both showcase an actress in expert command of her powers. Both prompted her typical unease.

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In “The Madison,” Michelle Pfeiffer stars as a pampered Manhattan woman who travels to Montana after a tragedy.Credit...Emerson Miller/Paramount+

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In “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” she portrays the mother of a struggling young woman, played by Elle Fanning.Credit...Apple TV

“I always go into a part with some trepidation, because I never quite know how I’m going to go about it,” she said over lunch. She sounded mildly regretful. “I’d love to be able to skate through some of these things.”

Skating is not in her repertory. “That’s why she is the actress that she is,” said Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed all of “The Madison.” “She has never sat back in any role in her career.”

Nearly five decades into that career, Pfeiffer is trying, falteringly, to learn different habits: to let go a little more, to vanish into her roles a little less, to resist an inclination to obsess.

“That’s not healthy,” she said. But that is all she has ever known. She seemed sincere in her desire to ease up on her perfectionism and unsure of the actress and the person she would be without it.

I met Pfeiffer on a cloudless February day at an unassuming Santa Monica restaurant. The restaurant’s interior was cool and otherwise deserted, which meant she could enjoy the relative anonymity she prefers. It had taken my eyes a little while to adjust to the dimness and longer to adjust to Pfeiffer, who has the kind of prettiness that makes a person dazed and squinty. I might as well have gone back outside and stared up at the sun.

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“I always go into a part with some trepidation, because I never quite know how I’m going to go about it,” Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer has never been comfortable in trading on her beauty. She isn’t comfortable with press either. She tolerates interviews better than she used to, especially those for her fragrance company, Henry Rose. But talking about her work to a stranger is a very mild form of torture.

“It’s emotional,” she said. “I start to feel anxious about it, the exposure.”

During the meal, she was never less than gracious, sharing her vegetable sides, answering questions with what felt like real honesty. She was also palpably shy. I felt protective of her, even as I was aware that a star like her — a star who has played Catwoman! — does not need protecting. I’d never sat across from someone in whom such strength and such fragility collided.

If beauty (incontestable unless you are Pfeiffer, who has described her face as ducklike) explains some of the fascination she exerts onscreen, even more compelling is the emotive tension she brings to many of her characters, who feel deeply even as they try to protect and withhold those feelings. Acting began early for her. As a child in what she called “an unpredictable household,” she play-acted her personality, behaving in ways that she thought would keep her safe. In many of her best performances — in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988) or “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989), say — there is a child’s watchfulness layered underneath, a child’s fear of hurt.

Pfeiffer has always been choosy about her roles: clockwise from top left, in “Dangerous Liaisons”; in “The Fabulous Baker Boys”; with Robert De Niro in “The Wizard of Lies”; with Danny DeVito in "Batman Returns.”Credit...Warner Bros. (“Dangerous Liaisons” and “Batman Returns”); Craig Blankenhorn/HBO ("The Wizard of Lies”); 20th Century Fox (“The Fabulous Barker Boys”)

Her attitude toward her work has always been a dance of approach and avoidance. After those early bombshell years, she was vigilant about the parts she took. (An agent nicknamed her Dr. No.) By the 2000s, married to the prolific writer and producer David E. Kelley and a mother to two young children, she became even more careful, declining offers that would disrupt family life. She loved motherhood and was grateful for how it blunted her tendency to obsess over her work.

“It forces you out of your narcissism,” she said. “I was a much happier person when I became a mom.”

Once both children were in college, she returned more fully to acting. The offers had been there before, but many were unappealing, “evil stepmother or parts that just felt very demeaning to women,” she said. Now there were a few that felt better.

In 2017 she took her first major TV role in decades, as Ruth Madoff, the wife of the convicted financial scammer Bernie Madoff in the HBO film “The Wizard of Lies.” Several movies quickly followed.

Why return at all when she had such mixed feelings about the industry and how it treated women, particularly older women? Because even as motherhood has been a respite from work, work had been a respite, too, from the preoccupations of an overactive mind.

“It has been such a gift and got me through so many things,” she said. “I’m just better busy.”

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Motherhood tempered Pfeiffer’s tendency to obsess over work. “I was a much happier person when I became a mom,” she said.

She is very busy now, particularly in “The Madison,” which Sheridan wrote for her. “I needed a woman with a real internal strength as well as a very deep emotional well,” Sheridan wrote in an email. Pfeiffer had that.

Pfeiffer plays Stacy Clyburn, the matriarch of a wealthy Manhattan clan who decamps to Montana after a personal tragedy. Both Pfeiffer and Stacy are self-described city mice, and both benefit from long, loving marriages. But Pfeiffer had trouble with the part. She often begins by finding a thread of something in her own life that she can connect to the character. With the pampered Stacy, who learns self-sufficiency while wearing silk pajamas, she struggled to find that string.

Was she really struggling or was this her perfectionism talking? Certainly, some co-stars observed greater ease.

Beau Garrett and Elle Chapman, who play Stacy’s daughters, marveled at Pfeiffer’s naturalness in character and assuredness on set. “She has a gravitas to her,” Garrett said. “People just quiet down when she’s around.” She added that it was a privilege to be yelled at by Pfeiffer in fraught family scenes. This was echoed by Chapman.

“She has a gaze that can completely level you,” she said admiringly.

But the naturalness doesn’t come naturally, or at least not entirely. Kurt Russell, who plays Stacy’s husband, previously worked with Pfeiffer on the dubious 1988 thriller “Tequila Sunrise.”

“It looks effortless, but it’s not at all effortless,” he said in an interview.

Sheridan also saw the cost. “I honestly don’t know how Michelle was able to access that level of emotion take after take, and day after day,” he said. “An actor of her talent and skill could have easily pulled any number of tricks out of her basket, but she didn’t. Not once. She forced herself to embrace the suffering.”

“The Madison” shot two six-episode seasons, about a year apart. In between, Pfeiffer shot the first season of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” based on the celebrated Rufi Thorpe novel. The show is about a young woman, Margo (Elle Fanning), who becomes unexpectedly pregnant and then supports herself as a cam girl. Pfeiffer plays Shyanne, Margo’s mother, a former Hooters waitress now engaged to a youth minister.

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Kelley created the series. It is Pfeiffer’s first meaningful collaboration with him since she played a part in his 1996 film “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday.”

This was by choice. When they were first married, in 1993, appearing on a TV series, Kelley’s typical domain, would have been a career embarrassment. Besides, Pfeiffer said, “When I come home from work and I’ve had a bad day, I want him to be on my side. I want him to believe my version.” That trumped co-working.

But television is no longer the comedown it used to be. And when Kelley read the novel, he knew that for Shyanne he needed an actress who could be both despicable and lovable, who could credibly say a line like “I’m just terrible at everything except being pretty,” who could command sympathy even as she repelled it.

“I really just couldn’t see anyone else but her playing Shyanne,” Kelley said in an interview.

In the book, Shyanne appears only briefly, so Pfeiffer agreed, not knowing that the role would be expanded to include scenes of department-store humiliation and bachelorette-party high jinks. If she wrestled with Stacy’s elegance on “The Madison,” Shyanne’s pleather and grit were closer to hand. Pfeiffer, who grew up in Orange County, not far from where Shyanne lives, had known plenty of people like her, strivers who were dealt lousy hands and played them the best they could.

“It didn’t take a lot for me to step into those shoes,” Pfeiffer said.

Fanning, who first worked with Pfeiffer on the 2001 weepie “I Am Sam,” marveled at the “astounding balance of fight and vulnerability” that Pfeiffer brought to the role, as well as a gift for spontaneity. “When you watch Michelle, you never know which way she’s going to play it,” Fanning wrote in an email.

Pfeiffer feels good about these recent shows — as good as she allows herself to feel, at least. (And Kelley confirmed that so far their marriage has survived.) She has always disappeared into her roles, but this time, because she was going back and forth between projects and taking time out to visit her husband and her daughter and granddaughter, she couldn’t do her usual vanishing act. She doesn’t think the work has suffered.

“If you’re going to survive, you’re going have to figure out a way to do this and enjoy your life and not disappear,” she said. She sounded confident. This was toward the end of the interview, and she had exposed herself enough. A few minutes later she slipped away into the restaurant’s shadows and then back out into the sun.

Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.

See more on: Michelle Pfeiffer

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The Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta marks a turning point in the fight over whether public schools may socially transition gender-dysphoric children without informing their parents. In lifting the Ninth Circuit’s stay of a district court injunction against California’s parental-exclusion policies, the Court has signaled that parents are more than just bystanders in the upbringing of their own children.

At issue were California policies that prohibit public schools from informing parents if their child adopts a new gender identity at school, unless the child consents to his or her parents being told. The state instructed teachers to use new names and pronouns and to withhold information about those changes from parents, even upon the parents’ request. Both parents and teachers challenged these rules as violations of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of parental rights.

The Court’s unsigned opinion concluded that the parents are likely to succeed on the merits, meaning their constitutional claims are presumptively valid. California’s policies, it explained, trigger strict scrutiny—the highest standard of judicial review—because they “substantially interfere with the rights of parents to guide the religious development of their children.” The parents in this case hold religious beliefs about sex and gender. By facilitating social transition at school while cutting out parents, the state’s policy imposes “the kind of burden on religious exercise that Yoder [Wisconsin v. Yoder, an important precedent] found unacceptable.”

The Court was equally clear about the constitutional significance of parental rights. Citing Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Meyer v. Nebraska, the opinion reaffirmed that parents possess a longstanding right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

That right includes participation in consequential decisions affecting a child’s mental health. Gender dysphoria, the Court noted, “is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health,” and California’s policy “facilitates a degree of gender transitioning during school hours,” while concealing that fact from parents. Such a regime likely violates the Constitution.

Importantly, the Court rejected the Ninth Circuit’s cramped reading of last year’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that public schools burden parents’ religious exercise when they require children to participate in instruction involving gender-identity materials without opt-outs. The lower court had dismissed Mahmoud as a “narrow decision.” The Supreme Court disagreed, explaining that California’s policies “likely will not survive the strict scrutiny that is required.”

Parents advocate for religious rights outside the Supreme Court during arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor in 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s concurrence, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, underscored that this case involves nothing novel. The parents “are likely to succeed on the merits under a straightforward application” of established precedent. Barrett also dismantled the dissent’s suggestion that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case that overturned Roe v. Wade) undermined parental-rights doctrine. Dobbs rejected the freewheeling expansion of unenumerated rights untethered from history and tradition. It did not call into question deeply rooted precedents, like Pierce and Meyer, that protect parental authority in education and childrearing.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—Justice Sonia Sotomayor also dissented but didn’t join Kagan’s opinion—criticized the Court for acting on its so-called emergency docket, claiming that the majority “already knows what it thinks.” But interim relief requires courts to assess the likelihood of success. As Barrett noted, when the balance of equities strongly favors one side and constitutional rights are at stake, granting relief is hardly radical.

Though it’s an abbreviated ruling at the interim-relief stage, the broader significance of Mirabelli is profound: we may in retrospect call this moment Mirabelli dictu. Across the country, school districts have adopted policies that treat parents as obstacles rather than partners in education. Some educators insist that concealing a child’s gender transition is necessary for the child’s safety. But the Constitution doesn’t permit the state to displace parents’ moral and medical authority based on ideological disagreement.

The Manhattan Institute has been at the forefront of this debate. We’ve filed amicus briefs in cases challenging similar parental-exclusion policies nationwide, including Foote v. Ludlow School Committee and Littlejohn v. Leon County School Board—both now the subject of certiorari petitions before the Supreme Court. In those cases, as in Mirabelli, parents allege that schools socially transitioned their children without notice or consent.

The tide is turning, the constitutional questions are converging, and the Court appears increasingly prepared to provide clarity.

Top Photo by Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP via Getty Images

• Resource Misallocation: The Iranian regime has prioritized the mass production of ballistic missiles and drones over critical domestic infrastructure, specifically ignoring severe water shortages and failing power grids in major cities.
• Financial Facilitation: The Obama administration’s 2016 transfer of $1.7 billion, coinciding with the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), provided the regime with significant liquidity that was subsequently directed toward military expansion.
• Strategic Failures: The JCPOA failed to halt nuclear enrichment activities, instead providing the regime with increased oil revenues that were utilized to expand centrifuge capacity at facilities like Natanz and Fordow.
• Growth of the IRGC: The Revolutionary Guards expanded their influence and military arsenal by capturing an increasing share of national oil revenues, often dismissing internal warnings from regional neighbors regarding their aggressive regional ambitions.
• Public Neglect: Due to the sustained focus on military capabilities, Iran suffers from chronic underinvestment that has brought urban centers to the brink of crisis, with many citizens facing potential displacement due to desertification and lack of water access.
• Security Necessity: The ongoing military efforts to neutralize Iranian drone and missile manufacturing capabilities are viewed as critical defensive measures to protect regional energy assets and critical infrastructure from persistent threats.

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