LOS ANGELES -- Michelle Pfeiffer, a Hollywood babe for 25 years, never felt so traumatized: She had to look at herself in the mirror in Stardust and see the ravages of aging.
"It was something!" Pfeiffer says with mock horror.
With two sister uglies, Pfeiffer plays a monstrous witch who desperately searches out a fallen star -- Claire Danes -- so she can eat her heart and regain her youthful vitality. The hideous elements were achieved through extreme prosthetics and makeup.
"I tell you, we had to talk each other off ledges, me and my gal witches," Pfeiffer says of the ordeal of up to six-and-a-half hours of makeup daily, plus one hour of peeling it off, to do the hideous witch scenes for the adult fairy tale.
Ego? "You've just got to check it at the door," Pfeiffer says.
But she did enjoy the power to scare people on set. "Nobody could get used to it. It just was unsettling for everyone to be around me. But nobody ever disagreed with me!"
Stardust lampoons the notion of chasing beauty and youth to extremes, especially through surgery or eating disorders, Pfeiffer says.
"It's just become so grotesque. It's a metaphor for it. We've really lost sight of what's beautiful -- literally."
Now 49, the Californian says she does pine to look like she did at 35, not 25, although she will never resort to extreme measures to do it.
"I feel that you kind of come together as a woman (at 35) and I feel like I was happier than I ever had been because I met my husband, I became a mother, and it showed on my face."
At the same time, she is aging gracefully -- except in Stardust.
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