ILLUSTRATION CHRISTOPHER LEE LYONS

IN FEBRUARY THIS year, a video from the set of Tim Burton’s 1992 film Batman Returns went viral on Twitter. The clip showed a blacklatex-clad Michelle Pfeiffer, looking sleek and hyper-focused. She handily cracks a whip, decapitating four mannequins at lightning speed in one take. The cast and crew around her applaud. Now that — the entire internet seemed to agree — was true commitment to a part.

Pfeiffer’s performance as Catwoman — once a spineless secretary pushed to the margins, now proudly stalking those margins instead of cowering in them — walks the line between tongue-in-cheek fun and derangement, never tipping too far either way. And the almost pathological outsiderdom that the character represents is a strikingly prevalent theme in Pfeiffer’s work. In fact, that love for the peripheral and the shadowy may well be the defining trait of her career.

At first glance, seeing anything ‘shadowy’ about her might be difficult. With her wide blue eyes and blonde hair, she has regularly been touted as one of the most beautiful stars in Hollywood. Her upbringing, in Santa Ana, California, was, by her account in Los Angeles Magazine, “pretty normal” and “suburban”.

Pfeiffer was the second-oldest of four, with parents who owned a small air-conditioning business, and she remains close to her family today. Yet, for whatever reason, none of those markers of good adjustment seemed to waylay her sense of dislocation. “A little bit, my whole life,” she told Elle in 2011, “I felt like an outsider.”

That’s translated to her work, with Pfeiffer embodying all manner of oddballs, from screwball-comedy heroines to down-and-out nightclub singers and vampy crime mavens. She can toggle between extremes at will, unafraid to commit to a ‘big’ performance, and infusing those larger-than-life roles with glee. This capacity for chameleonic transformation, paired with a notoriously exacting eye for her chosen roles (she turned down so many films in the ’90s, including Pretty Woman and Thelma & Louise, that her agent nicknamed her ‘Dr No’), has kept her from being limited as any one type of actor, or as any one type of woman.

THE BOX OFFICE

Michelle Pfeiffer’s top five money-makers*

AVENGERS: ENDGAME** $2.8 billion

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP $623 million

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS $353 million

WHAT LIES BENEATH $291 million

BATMAN RETURNS $267 million

*Global box office, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com **Seen as Janet Van Dyne at Tony Stark’s funeral but has no dialogue

In the beginning, Hollywood just “didn’t quite know where to pigeonhole me”, Pfeiffer told Indiewire recently. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t try.

As Elvira in Scarface (1983);

The Witches Of Eastwick (1987);

With Dean Stockwell in Married To The Mob (1988).

Her first major film role, in the maligned Grease 2 (1982), was not what you’d call an auspicious beginning. Pfeiffer got to show her big-screen chops — and a singing voice that would later come in handy in The Fabulous Baker Boys — but ultimately was left frustrated by the “bimbo” nature of the role, as she told The New York Times. This was something she was stridently looking to avoid; Pfeiffer was well aware of the stereotypes around her appearance. As director and friend Jonathan Demme would tell Empire back in 1990, “I think that more than any other quote-unquote beautiful actress, Michelle has been handicapped by her appearance. She has such an overwhelming face that people have tended to cast her because of the way she looks.” In the same issue, Pfeiffer herself put it prosaically: “Beauty? I kind of scowl at it.