People Weekly Magazine

July 13, 1992

Cover Story:
Batman's Michelle Pfeiffer:
Catwoman in Love

by
Michael A Lipton, Lorenzo Benet in Midway City,
Bob Langford in Wilmington, and
Lyndon Stambler & Cynthia Sanz in Los Angeles

THE TWO LIVES OF CATWOMAN:

Onscreen she's a haughty, naughty feline, Batman's purrfect foil. But unmasked, the real Michelle Pfeiffer is a Plain Jane who shuns makeup, ducks fans and cohabits with a nonhunk actor she adores.

Like a catwoman on a hot tin roof, Michelle Pfeiffer is sizzling this summer. As the slinky, kinky, whip-snapping, wisecracking antiheroine of Batman Returns, she has helped transform the year's most eagerly anticipated movie into one of the biggest blockbusters of all time (more than $100 million and purring) and guaranteed herself superstar status in the bargain. Yet despite a glamorous image that keeps her in the public eye (she's been one of PEOPLE's 50 Most Beautiful People in the World for three years running), Pfeiffer, 34, remains a mystery woman offscreen. Playing Catwoman, she has said, "I have to be frivolous and off-the-cuff and over-the-top, and it isn't may nature to be any of those things."

Indeed the unmasked Michelle appears to be a lot closer in personality to Catwoman's mousy, inhibited alter ego, Selina Kyle. "The way my mouth curls up and my nose tilts," Pfeiffer once joked, self-deprecatingly, "I should be cast as Howard the Duck." This other Michelle downplays her beauty by routinely pulling her hair back into a ponytail and wearing no makeup. Often hidden, in the interest of privacy, under a floppy hat, behind sunglasses and in T-shirt and jeans, she certainly makes no effort to look like a movie goddess.
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Of her love of three years, actor Fisher Stevens, Michelle Pfeiffer has said, "Fisher is not your standard leading-man type, but I adore him"

Pfeiffer and Stevens met three years ago, when both were appearing in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night. She was making her New York stage debut as the desirable countess Olivia; he was her foolish suitor, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Their real-life courtship had a shaky first act. Stevens, who at 18 had changed his name from Steven Fisher (already used by another actor) and had previously been linked with Helen (Supergirl) Slater, whisked Pfeiffer to Paris for what was supposed to be a romantic interlude. Just as they arrived, however, Stevens fell "violently ill" with the flu, recounts Johnson. "How would you feel if you were with a beautiful, talented person in paris and you were sick? I remember him saying that she was terrific about the illness." Their romance survived that crisis, and they have been loyally winging ever since between his co-op in Manhattan, her hacienda-style home in Santa Monica and their far-flung locations.
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Pfeiffer seems determined to make this relationship work. "When she sets her goals in a direction, look out," says her father, Dick, 59...

<snip history of Pfeiffer's early years>

She also came into her own personally. "After Peter Horton, Fisher seemed like a strange turn-around for Michelle," Dick Pfeiffer concedes. "But you know what she told me? 'Dad, Fisher makes me laugh. The others made me cry.' " Fisher, adds Dick, is "real good to Michelle and fun to be around."
..

Women find Michelle's man, Fisher Stevens (at the Golden Globes with her), "adorable and sexy," says David Beaird, the producer of his new TV series, Key West.

"Fisher has a great sense of humor," confirms his mother, Sally Fisher, 49, a Los Angeles painter and AIDS activist who raised her son alone in Manhattan after being divorced from his father, Norman, a Chicago furniture executive. And she thinks the apparent differences between Fisher and Michelle are merely skin-deep. "Fisher would not be with someone just because they're beautiful," she says. "He's with Michelle because she's wonderful inside."

Looks aren't an issue, their contemporaries concur. Nor, they say, is the couple's six-year age gap a barrier. Fisher, who as a teen successfully battled Hodgkin's disease (a lymphatic cancer), is "very mature for his age. He's 28 going on 70," says David Beaird, Stevens' executive producer on his upcoming Fox series, Key West, a sort of Southern Exposure in which eh plays a lottery-winning writer from New Jersey. "He comes across as sensitive and smart," continues Beaird. "And he's fascinated by people. He's interested in the busboy and the hot dog vendor. He could go to a KKK rally and walk up to anybody and find out why they got demented."

Stevens' friends, who address him as Fish (Michelle prefers Fisher), adds that he's a good dancer and a competitive amateur athlete who excels at squash, basketball and touch football. "He's also a good poker player," says Dick Pfeiffer. "We play when he visits."

Michelle, in turn, goes shopping with Fisher's mother in L.A. and once skied with both of them in Taos, N.Mex., where Pfeiffer's fans inevitably discovered them dining at a lodge. Sally Fisher describes the fans' behavior as "appalling. People would come right up to the table and start arguing out loud whether that was Michelle Pfeiffer sitting in front of them," she says, ruefully. "Don't these people have a life?"

Under the circumstances, Michelle and Fisher are tyring to keep their life together as private as possible. Whenever she jets down to the Key West set, says Beaird, "he's very protective of her. He stays with her, keeps the press away, keeps everyone away. Maybe that's why they're still together."

But all too often they're apart. "It's difficult," Stevens says of their cross-country relationship. "But we're working it out." Last month he flew from Wilmington, N.C., where he is shooting Super Mario Bros., a big-screen version of the popular video game, to escort Pfeiffer to the Hollywood premiere of Batman Returns. As photographers and reporters mobbed her outside Mann's Chinese Theatre, Stevens stood about 10 feet away, all but ignored and looking uncomfortable. "It's completely overwhelming," he said softly. "There are just so many people."
..

"They fell in love the first month," says Fisher's mom of the couple (in L.A. last year).

Which is why they prefer to stay home. Last winter, while Pfeiffer was shooting Batman Returns in L.A., she and Fisher nested in her Santa Monica spread. After an exhausting day on the set, he recalls, "she'd come home with a completely different hairstyle, depending on whom she was playing, Selina or Catwoman. It was funny." She also walked around the house practicing her feline avenger's antics (the kickboxing close-ups onscreen are all hers, though a stunt double did Catwoman's backflips). And, says Stevens, "she was constantly cracking her Catwoman whip."

When, if ever, will Pfeiffer take another crack at wedlock? "I don't know if they'll marry," says Sally Fisher. "But they're very affectionate with one another, and they think about having children." <snip rest of article>