She is, says Stephen Frears, who directed her in Dangerous Liaisons, the sort of actress who "just sort of grows in the cans of film. It's as if there are things stored-up inside of her which gradually come out as you edit. She seems born to be in the movies. She just has this wonderfully expressive face. She's what it must have been like, I expect. . .sort of like what Garbo was."

In person, Michelle Pfeiffer doesn't really evoke Garbo. At first glance, she seems more like a rarefied version of a West Coast prom queen, sandblasted to a razor-cheeked fineness. She speaks in a flat, friendly Americanese edged with the self-protective hesitancy common to beautiful women who are tired of being hit on. You soon sense something disturbing in her appearance, though— an off-center intensity in the preternaturally blue eyes and the asymmetrical swell of the plump upper lip. And the generally mundane, pause-spliced sentences she utters seem weighted with purposeful self-editing. She is at once befuddlingly ordinary and uncanny—the enigma next door.

On celluloid, her directors say, Pfeiffer registers with a multidimensional force that isn't always obvious on the set. And her career shows a similar elucidation of hidden strengths, like a slowly developing photograph.

Seven years ago, when she landed her first starring role, in the ill-fated Grease 2, she was a girl it seemed easy to pigeonhole. Another ambitious blonde with the kind of sunny California sexiness that has always had its place in Hollywood, and a resume which included jobs as a checkout girl in Vons supermarkets, a Miss Orange County title, and cheesecake roles in a couple of short-lived yahoo television series (Delta House, B.A.D. Cats) and films with titles like Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. A simple girl, a simple story.

The industry couldn't have anticipated her quiet obduracy in resisting this scenario. Today, at thirty, she is a complicated mix of sugar and steel who has graduated to the $1-million-plus per picture that certifies stardom in Hollywood.

She is nobody's bimbo. "When I met her, I thought she was very soft and maybe too sweet, too nice," says her friend Cher, who co-starred with her in The Witches of Eastwick. "But, you know, it's all part of someone who has a definite purpose, who's a lot stronger than even she knows sometimes. . . . It's not possible to mess with her and come out on top." Says Pfeiffer herself, "Even from the beginning, when I was doing like junk television, I still had this focus. I knew I wasn't going to be doing that forever, that I wasn't going to be like that. . ."

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She hasn't been. This is Pfeiffer's annus mirabilis, with starring roles in a diverse trio of films. In only one of them, Tequila Sunrise, is she playing close to expected type. The other two demonstrate an exhilarating latitude. In Married to the Mob, Jonathan Demme's antic comedy, she was unexpectedly touching as the bewildered Mafia widow. In Dangerous Liaisons, her Mme. de Tourvel, the virtuous wife ruined by seduction, unravels with an intensity that is almost painful to watch. She gives an animating emotional heart to both of these highly stylized films. The beautiful face captures your attention, but what holds it is the measured tension in her performances— the disquieting balances of self-possession and self-abandonment.

One of three daughters of a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Midway City, Orange County, Pfeiffer recalls as a child watching old movies on television (without bothering to find out their names) and thinking casually, I can do that. She seems most comfortable talking about the days before she became an actress—hedonistic times at Fountain Valley High School, the supermarket, a course in court reporting—and often refers to them in discussing the present, as if that could somehow anchor a progressively more complicated life. When she talks about acting, there's accordingly little mention of magic or method—it's hard work, a job. If you stray onto more personal territory, she's visibly uneasy: she begins to probe her upper lip with her tongue and to stare at her feet. On the day I meet her, at the Vanity Fair photo session, her anxiety level seems stratospheric. She remarks offhandedly that she wishes her Santa Monica home were a black hole, and that she prefers gray to sunny days, because then you don't have to feel guilty about being depressed. She worries about looking "too perfect" in the photographs. She snaps at a styling assistant, who's rearranging her top—"I just can't stand people in my face all the time"—then apologizes. "I'm not normally like this," she sighs. It's a moment in her life when she'd rather not be doing any publicity. Rumors have appeared in Liz Smith's syndicated column of a real-life liaison with her (married) Liaisons co-star John Malkovich, and her press rep has warned that if Michelle talks to me at all (which isn't certain) I'd better not bring up the subject of "boyfriends."

"I'm probably more not in control now than I've ever been."

"You know," Pfeiffer is saying, in measured phrases, "I didn't become an actress so that my [beat] Life [beat] could be exposed. It's really the only thing that makes me contemplate quitting acting. I would give it up because I hate it that much." Friends confirm that she is deeply, inveterately private. "It takes a really long time to get to know her," says Cher. "You can know a certain amount of her, but even now we have a joke: I tell her, 'I wouldn't be surprised if one day you told me you had, like, a twenty-year-old child growing up someplace.' And I probably understand her better than anybody else."

Pfeiffer will offer certain details. Of her now estranged husband, Peter Horton, a star of TV's thirty something, she says, "I had a great marriage with a great man. They don't come much better than that." Then why did it end? "It's very confusing. We got married really young. I think we grew up and our views changed." Since the breakup, she suggests, her personal life has taken some disconcerting detours. "I'm probably more not in control now than I've ever been," she says suddenly, with a crazy, lopsided smile and rolling eyes. "You know, I'm not a wild person. Except for maybe when I was a teenager, I think I've been real safe. Now I'm, uh, willing to take more risks." Why? Long, long pause. "This is getting a little personal. I'm getting a little nervous. I mean, you know, I guess I finally realized. . . it's like this is not a dress rehearsal. It's life."

Professionally, at least, Pfeiffer seems very much in control, a status achieved through her rigorous selection of parts and her ability to milk them for a subtlety not always evident in the script. Even to roles which used her as a beautiful icon—the frosty mobster moll in Scarf ace, or the fairy-tale heroine in Ladyhawke—she brought a tantalizing hint of vulnerable strength. "We held out for as long as we could between pictures, until she had to go work," says Ed Limato, her agent since 1983. "She's extremely bright. She's very quiet, she doesn't show it, but she's no fool. She'll listen to every argument, and every opinion, but she'll make the decision herself."

Pfeiffer shrugs off her role as The Girlfriend opposite Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell in Robert Towne's Tequila Sunrise, a film she says she "might catch flipping channels, on HBO." She continues: "I had a hard time playing that part. It was very limited as far as what I could do. She's a very controlled sort of person; I don't find those roles fun to play."

Other roles have been more gratifying. In 1987's Witches, she held her own against cinematic heavyweights Jack Nicholson, Cher, and Susan Sarandon and—as the fecund small-town mother who discovers supernatural powers— found a neat showcase for her ordinary-girl surface and subliminal exoticism. She also probably enjoyed the character's bedraggled appearance and clumsiness. She has said she'd like to play a bag lady, although her beauty doesn't camouflage easily. James Acheson, the costume designer for Liaisons—who says she was "very, very particular about the visual aspects of what we were doing"—recalls that after seeing the first rushes she requested her costumes be made less splendid. "She felt," he says, "that she looked too pretty. In fact, we reduced things. But it also had to do with the fact that it's Michelle Pfeiffer's face."

This detachment about her appearance tallies with the no-nonsense, determinedly conscientious approach her co-workers say she invariably brings to the set. Susan Sarandon recalls that on the first day of rehearsals for the frenzied Witches shoot, Pfeiffer "was the one who had every copy—four or five drafts—of the script. She could cross-reference them according to lines. I was like 'What difference does it make? These are witches, this is the Devil.' But Michelle had all of her source material laid out like a lawyer's brief." Mel Gibson, her Tequila co-star, describes her as someone "who always seemed very sure. She was very firm about what she was doing and how she wanted to do it." She is unanimously praised for her technical facility (particularly her seemingly innate awareness of the camera), and is, Frears and Demme both assert, that Hollywood rarity, a performer who gives them what they need on the first take.

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It isn't always that simple. During the emotionally brutalizing production of Liaisons—in which, as Pfeiffer puts it, "I have about three nervous breakdowns"— she remembers sitting in her trailer with Malkovich, saying, "I can't do this, I can't do this again." She had to cry so much on-camera she'd come to work with her eyes swollen shut. Still, she says, reverting to her characteristic pragmatic voice, she was always confident "that it was all there, and I wouldn't have any trouble."

Only once in movies has Pfeiffer played an actress. It was in Alan Alda's 1986 Sweet Liberty, and she brought satiric bite to a sugary movie as a star who radiates demureness and purity when the camera's rolling, and turns into a tough, career-driven bitch when it stops. "People would say to me, 'Gosh, Michelle, you're nothing like that. How did you know how to play that part?' And sometimes I feel like since then I have become that person. You know, it's like 'No more Mrs. Nice Guy.' "

No one I talked to corroborates that view of Michelle Pfeiffer. "She just treats everybody on the set with tremendous respect," says Demme. "She's the only actor I've ever heard of who received an extremely special, costly gift [a pair of seed-pearl earrings] from the film crew at the end of the shooting." If there's a dichotomy in Pfeiffer, it seems to be more

between the simple "sensible, levelheaded" woman Frears describes and the actress who reads fathoms-deep on the screen. That quality—after all the talk about technique and camera facility—is, always, pretty indefinable. Frears will tell you it has something to do with the fact that "she's extremely firmly centered and has a very strong sense of truth about what she's doing. You can't get her to do a false thing." Demme talks about her "strength of character, a high level of decency of spirit." Whatever. It's working. "As far as I'm concerned," says Demme, "the sky's the limit in what Michelle's capable of doing. It's hard for me to imagine anyone who, on a level of quality, would have an edge on her."

In the meantime, Pfeiffer, who had announced she'd take a break after going back-to-back on Tequila and Liaisons, is back on the set, filming The Fabulous Baker Boys with Jeff and Beau Bridges. Her agent says he gets about ten scripts a week for her. Pfeiffer says she knows that there'll probably be a slump in the future, and that there will again be the parts "that bore the ass off you.

"I've had enough of those to know I never want to do it again," she says, drawing tautly on a Marlboro Light. "I mean, I'd rather go back to checking groceries.''