On aging, and rebirth

HOLLYWOOD - Michelle Pfeiffer insists it was all in the lighting.

The 51-year-old actress is discussing an arresting scene in her new film, “Cheri,’’ in which she literally seems to age a decade, all under the unflinching eye of the camera. It’s one take - no cuts, no special effects. Clearly lighting helped, as did director Stephen Frears, who insisted that her character, an aging French courtesan, smile luminously throughout the early part of the film, purposely saving the shock of what Pfeiffer calls the “droopage’’ for that moment.

“When your face is in repose, everything drops and you age,’’ she explains, with a chortle. “I’d like to say that we used prosthetics but we didn’t.’’

What she glosses over is the utter pathos she brings to the scene, that of a beautiful woman staring into the abyss of age and loneliness.

For people who grew up on Pfeiffer’s icy beauty in “Scarface,’’ or watched her writhe on top of a grand piano in “The Fabulous Baker Boys,’’ or giggled during “Batman Returns,’’ when, as Catwoman, she snapped her whip with sadomasochistic glee, a senescent Pfeiffer is almost an unimaginable concept. In person, she appears as a beautiful, mature woman of indeterminate age. The skin is still creamy, the cheekbones curvy and pronounced, the eyes that eerie green-blue.

Over tea at the Four Seasons hotel, she is dressed for anonymity, arriving in a gray top, black slacks, and black Jackie-O glasses that almost completely obscure her famous visage. Yet, when the glasses come off, she is unexpectedly straightforward.

“Cheri,’’ which opened last week, certainly dives headfirst into the feminine dilemma of the aging beauty. Based on a pair of novels by Colette and set in pre-World War I France, it tells the story of the professional siren Lea de Lonval, who falls unexpectedly in love with a much younger, slightly vapid, but exceedingly beautiful young man, played by Rupert Friend.

“It certainly was walking into the eye of the storm, in terms of the whole issue of aging. I turned 50 on the set,’’ Pfeiffer says. She was happy that she was working, so she didn’t have time to dwell on crossing the 5-0 Rubicon, although she notes, “Honestly, there’s certainly a mourning that takes place. I mourn the young girl, but I think that what replaces that is a kind of a liberation, sort of letting go of having to hold on to that. Everyone knows you’re 50. So you don’t have to worry about not trying to look 50. And then it becomes, `Hey, she looks good for her age.’ ’’

For Frears, his short list of actresses for the part essentially consisted of one person: Pfeiffer. “What’s good about her [in the part] is she is extremely hard-headed and she’s very touching and very vulnerable,’’ he says. “She was always very, very good about her age. She wasn’t endlessly whispering into the cameraman’s ear.’’

If anything, she says, it was cinematographer Darius Khondji who consistently balked when told to make Pfeiffer “look my worst.’’ Pfeiffer works relatively infrequently these days. She took off five years after 2002’s “White Oleander’’ to devote to her family, her two teenagers and husband David E. Kelley, the creator of TV shows including “Ally McBeal’’ and “L.A. Law.’’

Even now she and her agent, Chris Andrews of Creative Artists Agency, have a code name for worthy scripts. They call them “dead of winter’’ as in good enough projects that they “warrant me leaving my family during the middle of the school years and knowing they can’t come with me actually,’’ she explains.

“Cheri’’ was one of those rare projects. Pfeiffer was sitting in the makeup chair on her film “Personal Effects’’ (a little-seen effort with Ashton Kutcher) when her hairdresser got a call and handed the phone to the actress. It was Frears - with whom Pfeiffer worked on “Dangerous Liaisons’’ - telling her about “Cheri.’’

“He couldn’t have just called my agent, you know?’’ she says, laughing. He sent her the script, which she loved so much that she kept “waiting for the other shoe to drop because movies fall apart all the time,’’ she says.

Pfeiffer can be delightfully blunt - which is partly why several years ago, she gave up her production company. “The process is too heartbreaking for me,’’ she says about making movies on the other side of the camera. “It’s years out of your life and mostly a lot of dead ends. And I also don’t think my temperament is right because I’m really a straightforward person. I call it as I see it. I expect people to deal with me in the same way. And when they don’t I get really angry. When I ended the company I kind of had this rebirth for my love of acting.’’

When she does work, her focus is complete, as she demonstrates in “Cheri.’’

“It’s been a year almost to the day that I stopped filming ‘Cheri,’ ’’ Pfeiffer says, “and I still haven’t recovered.’’