Michelle Pfeiffer was born in Santa Ana, California, to Donna Jean (Taverna) and Richard Pfeiffer, a heating and air-conditioning contractor. She has an older brother and two younger sisters - Dedee Pfeiffer and Lori Pfeiffer, who both dabbled in acting and modeling but decided against making it their life's work. Her parents were both originally from North Dakota. Her father had German and British Isles ancestry, and her mother was of half Swiss-German and half Swedish descent.

Pfeiffer graduated from Fountain Valley High School in 1976, and attended one year at the Golden West College, where she studied to become a court reporter. But it was while working as a supermarket checker at Vons, a large Southern California grocery chain, that she realized her true calling. She was married to actor/director Peter Horton ("Gary" of Thirtysomething (1987)) in 1981. They were later divorced, and she then had a three year relationship with actor Fisher Stevens. When that did not work out, Pfeiffer decided she did not want to wait any longer before having her own family, and in March 1993, she adopted a baby girl, Claudia Rose. On November 13th of the same year, she married lawyer-turned-writer/producer David E. Kelley, creator of Picket Fences (1992), Chicago Hope (1994), The Practice (1997), and Boston Public (2000). On August 5, 1994, their son John Henry was born.

Family

David E. Kelley (13 November 1993 - present) ( 2 children)

Trivia

Used to work in a clothing store.
In October 1997 she was ranked #39 in "Empire" (UK) magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list.
Born at 8:11am-PDT.
Had thought about looking for someone to father a child with "no strings attached," but decided to adopt instead. She adopted a daughter, Claudia Rose, born in 1993. Also that year, she married David E. Kelley, with whom she also had a son, in 1994.
Won the Miss Orange County beauty pageant.
In 1997 was voted Best Dressed Female Movie Star.
Studied acting at The Beverly Hills Playhouse.
Her name was misspelled as "Michele" in the credits of Callie & Son (1981).
In 1995 was ranked #3 by "Empire" magazine on its list of 00 Sexiest Stars in film history.
Replaced Annette Bening as Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992), due to the former actress' pregnancy.
Does her own singing in Grease 2 (1982), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Prince of Egypt (1998) and Hairspray (2007).
In 2000 the character Catwoman/Selina Kyle, who she played in Batman Returns (1992), was voted #3 in "Empire" magazine's "69 Sexiest Movie Characters of All Time".
Turned down the Sharon Stone role in Basic Instinct (1992).
As a teenager working as a clerk at a Vons Grocery Store in southern California in 1974, she learned to tie maraschino cherry stems in knots with her tongue.
Has an adopted daughter named Claudia Rose (born in 1993) and a son named John Henry (born in 1994) with husband David E. Kelley, named after David's father.
Accidentally cut Al Pacino with broken glass while auditioning for Scarface (1983).
Studied acting under Geraldine Page in a workshop at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles.
Her first job as a performer was playing "Alice" from Alice in Wonderland (1951) at Disneyland in the Main Street Electrical Parade in the mid-1970s.
There was a study done of the faces of beautiful women, quantifying the ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nose, attempting to find the perfect proportions for the perfect face of feminine beauty (the ratio turns out to be something like 1.7). The movie star with the most perfect proportions for feminine facial beauty, based on this measure, turns out to be Michelle Pfeiffer.

Personal Quotes 

I still think people will find out that I'm really not very talented. I'm really not very good. It's all just been a big sham.
[on playing her part of Claire Spencer in What Lies Beneath (2000)] "I thought about Drew Barrymore in the first Scream (1996) - I mean, ultimately that movie was more funny than scary, but the opening sequence was quite terrifying, and she portrayed terror in a way I'd never seen an actress do."
[on wearing her costume in Batman Returns (1992) for the first time]: "I thought to myself 'I can't move, I can't breathe, I can't think. I'm unhappy. I can't act'."
[on cosmetic surgery] "If that nose or those jowls bother you, do it! But this epidemic of people losing sight of what looks good, the distortion that has been going on is creepy."
I act for free, but I demand a huge salary as compensation for all the annoyance of being a public personality. In that sense, I earn every dime I make.
Ultimately, I believe the only secret to a happy marriage is choosing the right person. Life is a series of choices, right?
I was shocked at the prejudice, voiced in some quarters, over my decision to adopt a mixed-race baby. It's really surprising that people still put so much emphasis on it. None of us are pure anything. We're all a mixture. Claudia is a beautiful child, and some of the most beautiful people I've seen in the world have been of mixed race. As mother of both an adopted child and my own birth-child, there is absolutely no difference in the huge amount of love I feel for both my children. I always knew I wanted to adopt a child and also have one of my own. There is no difference at all.
I have to say this singing was harder than any I've done before. The melodies are so fast that you can barely get a breath in. But once I got past the 'Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into' phase, it was so much fun to sing again.
For me, getting comfortable with being famous was hard - that whole side of it, the loss of anonymity, the loss of privacy. Giving up that part of your life and not having control of it.
Acting's an odd profession for a young person; it's so extreme. You work, and the conditions are tough and the process is so immersive, and then it stops, and then there's nothing. So you have to find ways of making you feel productive when you're not actually producing anything. For a young person, that's really challenging.
[on her role as "Velma Von Tussle" in Hairspray (2007)] It's a lot of fun to play mean and sinister - but you certainly put yourself at risk for scenery chewing. And, every once in a while, Adam [Adam Shankman, the director] would come over to me after a take and say, "Hey, Michelle - is there a chair leg in your teeth?"
(From Movieline magazine April 2002) People like Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep have paved the way and our window of opportunity expands incrementally year by year. Obviously, the kind of roles I'm offered are different than before, but I feel like the roles have only gotten more interesting. I want to grow up to be Judi Dench or Ellen Burstyn. The older we get, the less we work, but look at the work just those two women are doing. It gets deeper.