Just before the release of "Dangerous Liaisons" in 1988, a story made the rounds that the film's director, Stephen Frears, had been reluctant to cast Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of Madame de Tourvel, the good woman whose life is destroyed when she loses her heart to the rake Valmont. Jonathan Demme, who had just finished filming "Married to the Mob" with Pfeiffer, offered to screen a rough cut of that film for Frears, who was impressed with Pfeiffer but still hesitant. "I just don't know," he reportedly said to Demme. "She's going to be acting with John Malkovich and Glenn Close." Demme stifled the words that popped into his mind: "They'd better watch out then."

No other actor of the past 10 to 12 years has come close to Michelle Pfeiffer for sheer versatility. No two of the performances she has turned out -- in pictures as varied as "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Russia House," "Batman Returns," "Frankie and Johnny," "Love Field," "Tequila Sunrise" and the PBS adaptation of John O'Hara's short story "Natica Jackson" -- are remotely alike. You can see Pfeiffer's range in the innocuous Alan Alda comedy "Sweet Liberty" (1986), in which she plays a movie star acting in a revolutionary war epic. The first time we see Pfeiffer she's preparing to go before the cameras in period character, all crinolines and hoop skirts and 18th century grace. Seeing her out of costume two scenes later is an almost Brechtian shock. Dressed in a baggy work shirt, her hair a cascading tangle, Pfeiffer puffs on a cigarette while berating her agent over the phone. Everything about her manner is sharp, abrupt, neurotically modern. Alda exclaims, "It's like you're two entirely different people." Pfeiffer answers, "If all I could be was two different people, I'd be out of business."

And yet during the first years she was in movies, it was a crapshoot whether Pfeiffer would get to prove herself at all. She had to overcome the obstacle that all enormously attractive people face: the assumption that somebody that pretty just can't act. She didn't get much help from the window-dressing roles that came her way (after she dropped out of college to pursue an acting career) in movies like "Grease 2" and "Into the Night," or in the short-lived TV shows "Delta House" and "B.A.D. Cats." It was easy to make the mistake of thinking this was just another pretty SoCal girl. But there's a weird reticence to those performances, a way in which Pfeiffer, sensing the worthlessness of the material, is deliberately holding part of herself back. What's lacking in her is exactly the thing most starlets are desperate to get across: a willingness to please.

She was window dressing again in Brian De Palma's "Scarface." Playing a gangster's moll, she makes a memorable entrance -- dressed in a form-fitting sequined gown, Pfeiffer slowly descends in a glass elevator. But this time the movie makes a place for her character's trashy hauteur in the drop-dead moment that follows: Pfeiffer sits bored in a Miami nightclub, not even bothering to hide her disdain, while her Mr. Big boyfriend (Robert Loggia) gets indiscriminately drunk with a couple of associates. Having had enough of this boys' show, Pfeiffer turns to Loggia and, in a voice that could freeze vodka, asks, "So, Frank, ya wanna dance, ya wanna sit there and have a heart attack?" It's a great tough-broad delivery, the kind that gets an actress noticed. But nobody could have guessed the range and the delicacy that were still to come.

They didn't quite come in the medieval fantasy "Ladyhawke" (1985) or the suburban fantasy "The Witches of Eastwick" (1987). But with 1987's "Natica Jackson" and the 1-2-3 punch of the following year's "Married to the Mob," "Tequila Sunrise" and "Dangerous Liaisons," Pfeiffer established the distinctive mix that has continued to define her performances.

The most characteristic quality of American acting has always been its straightforwardness, a no-nonsense approach that reflects the slangy, casual, wisecracking tone of American life. Pfeiffer has embraced that style while adding something it usually doesn't admit: poeticism. As much as any actress since Julie Christie or Judy Davis, Pfeiffer is attuned to evanescent shifts of mood. Her emotions seem visible, moving just below the surface of her luminous skin. To say she's an actress made for movies isn't merely to say that her beauty invites the camera but that the camera magnifies the subtle interplay of emotions that, at almost any given moment, are flickering over her face. That's why she was so perfectly cast in "Dangerous Liaisons" as a woman whose place in society depends on her ability to maintain a social mask, yet who is so guileless she can't hide what she's feeling. You could say the same thing of her role in Fred Schepisi's 1990 "The Russia House" (which is looking more and more like one of the decade's best films) as a Russian publishing assistant who gets involved in smuggling a document detailing the Soviet Union's nuclear capability to the West. Even with Glasnost, Pfeiffer's Katya is living in a society where she has to constantly watch herself, maintaining a poker face during surreptitious coded phone conversations with her physicist lover (the superb Klaus Maria Brandauer), and arresting the dreamy smile that comes over her when she hears a snatch of folk music in a restaurant and realizes she's giving something of herself away.

And it's tenderness that's present beneath the surface of Pfeiffer's more hard-boiled roles. Like nobody else, Pfeiffer can play tough and utterly vulnerable, as in the role of Susie Diamond, the professional escort turned lounge singer in "The Fabulous Baker Boys" (1989). In that film, Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges act out the most unyielding love duet imaginable. They're two people who are attracted to each other yet refuse to budge an inch. Each time they settle into the warm bath of seduction, one or both of them douse the mood in cold water. There's a sentimental side to "The Fabulous Baker Boys" that's in tune with the romantic self-pity of the standards that underscore the action. But Pfeiffer has a way of cutting through that, of making the daggers she aims hit their targets. The morning after she and Bridges first sleep together, she deadpans, "Don't worry ... your high-school graduation ring is safe." The performance might seem all edges if it weren't for the way Pfeiffer floods the aftermath of those moments with regret. The irony of Susie Diamond is that the protective armor she erects only makes it easier for her to beat herself up.

Perhaps the most impressive duet of Pfeiffer's career is the one she plays with Michael Keaton in "Batman Returns" (1992). When director Tim Burton eschews the folderol that clutters the film and focuses in on these two, he approaches the level of "The Empire Strikes Back" or "Superman II," films that offer the peculiarly moving spectacle of seeing comic-book characters inhabited by human-scale emotions. Certainly, Selina Kyle, the shy-mouse secretary who finds the second of her nine lives as Catwoman, is the wildest bit of acting Pfeiffer's ever done. Using a timid little voice in her first scenes, and with her hair as scattered as her stray thoughts, Pfeiffer heads right for caricature while maintaining a keening edge of emotional desperation beneath. One look at Selina's pink apartment, cluttered up with a child's stuffed animals and doll houses, tells you all you need to know about the character. When she's outfitted as the latex avenger Catwoman, everything in Pfeiffer's portrayal changes, from the insinuating, slow-as-molasses stride she employs to the deep slow-as-molasses voice that might be coming out of Tallulah Bankhead. As Selina falls in love with Bruce Wayne and their secret identities get in the way, Pfeiffer's performance grows even more neurotically lyrical, until she seems to be skipping along the knife's edge that separates fantasy from total emotional disintegration.

As Pfeiffer kept racking up one critically acclaimed performance after another, mostly in films that weren't hits, she seemed to be in the same position as the '30s Hollywood starlet she played in "Natica Jackson." In one scene, the studio head complains that Natica "can't carry a picture by herself," while her agent counters, "She walks off with every picture she's in and you know it." The debate about Pfeiffer was whether she had the star power to "open" a movie without the benefit of a famous male co-star. (Articles that attempted to address just how big a star Pfeiffer was felt duty bound to mention that she'd turned down both "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Thelma and Louise," as if saying no to those stinkers were proof of her bad judgment.) The argument wasn't settled until the urban-school melodrama "Dangerous Minds" turned out to be a surprise hit in the summer of 1995. But Pfeiffer continued to turn out astonishing performances, as she had in 1992's "Love Field," a slickly crafted melodrama about a Dallas housewife who runs away from her husband to take a Greyhound north for JFK's funeral. Pfeiffer pulls off an amazing transformation in the film, showing us how a woman who at first seems as silly as her peroxided puff of hair emerges from her fantasies to construct a real life for herself. And as a waitress who surrenders to the persistent courtship of a short-order cook (a rather creepy Al Pacino) in "Frankie and Johnny" (1991), Pfeiffer gave what may be her best performance to date.

Her casting in that film set off a brouhaha, however. The material, adapted by Terrence McNally from his play "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," is squarely in the pathos-of-the-little-people mode (like Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty"). Kathy Bates had played the part onstage, and Pfeiffer's casting unleashed the usual blather about the unfair advantage beauty has in the movies. But if you listened to the complaints, which ran along the lines of "Michelle Pfeiffer is too beautiful to be a waitress," you had to question the assumptions beneath them. Were those people saying that working-class women are ugly, or were they just falling back on the old canard that actors can't believably play ordinary people? As Frankie, Pfeiffer wears little make-up, has circles under her eyes and lets her hair go slack and dull. But she isn't playing the actress's game of courting praise by drabbing herself down. Frankie's weariness comes from the inside, from too many identical days of slinging hash and too many nights with louses. In a sense, Pfeiffer's beauty works so well because, for Frankie, it's beside the point; she's too slugged out by life to take notice of herself. The resistance she puts up to Pacino's Johnny may be the spikiest acting Pfeiffer's done, and it undercuts the play's simple-minded premise that heartbreak has caused Frankie to hide from the adventure of life. Pfeiffer plays Frankie as a woman stubborn enough to insist on making her own decisions, sick of having to live up to other people's expectations. Pfeiffer reverses the power structure of the play so that by the time she yields to Pacino, it's entirely on Her terms. She puts real grit in McNally's phony symphony of the big city, an edge that the writer's well-made play design can't smooth down.

It's hard not to feel that, in the last few years, Pfeiffer has been in something of a holding pattern. Her movie choices seem less fortuitous ("Wolf," "To Gillian on her 37th Birthday," "Up Close and Personal,"), and though she's often been fine in them, they don't seem to inspire her. It may be that her attention is elsewhere -- perhaps in raising her two children, an adopted daughter and a younger son from her marriage to producer David E. Kelley ("The Practice," "Ally McBeal"). Pfeiffer has voiced her reluctance to do any movies whose production would take her away from her children. And it may be that she is trying to reflect her experience as a mother with parts like "One Fine Day," "A Thousand Acres" and this year's "The Deep End of the Ocean." The trouble is that mom roles, by definition, tend toward the soft and sexless (some of the exceptions being Diane Keaton in "Shoot the Moon," Andie McDowell in "Unstrung Heroes" and Allison Steadman in "Life Is Sweet"), and the roles Pfeiffer is choosing leave no place for either her toughness or her lyricism.

Critics and feminists have been quick to complain that in the movies, women past 40 are no longer viewed sexually. Part of that problem is the virtuous roles that are touted for actresses past 40, washed-out domestic bits that are supposed to "address the concerns of real women" or some such thing (and are often from bestsellers written by women, as in the case of "A Thousand Acres" and "The Deep End of the Ocean"); overtly sexual roles are considered demeaning or inappropriate. The luxuriance Pfeiffer brings to the fairy queen Titania in Michael Hoffman's mucked-up new film of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a step in the right direction. But why does playing your age too often mean drabbing yourself down? And where does that leave those actresses, like Michelle Pfeiffer, whose sexuality is inseparable from their intelligence and their excitement?