It is a wackily OTT fantasy comedy based on John Updike’s novel, which perhaps reveals much about how Updike saw himself. One of Pfeiffer’s “witchy” roles, but atypical in that it is from her starry heyday. Hair raising … Pfeiffer (far right) with Cher and Susan Sarandon in The Witches of Eastwick. Pfeiffer gets a sexy moment, reprising the song Big, Blonde and Beautiful, attempting to seduce Tracy’s dad (Christopher Walken). Velma is icily opposed to a suggestion from the wide-eyed dance contestant Tracy Turnblad to bring white and black people together on the show. Here, in a remake of John Waters’s Hairspray of 1988, she plays the ruthless dragon-lady and former beauty queen Velma Von Tussle, the gimlet-eyed TV station chief in charge of a 60s pop music TV programme called The Corny Collins Show this has a segregationist attitude to black music, permitting it appear once a month on something it calls “Negro Day”. Pfeiffer returned to Hollywood after a five-year family break with this film (and Stardust, below) and it signalled a new career phase of character parts, comedy roles and wicked-witch turns. She nicely plays off the pouting petulance of Rupert Everett’s Oberon and there is something sweetly romantic in her magical infatuation with Bottom, played rather self-effacingly by Kevin Kline. She is queenly and self-possessed, with a British accent that puts the brakes on her line readings. At any rate, she is a gentle and serenely charming Titania in Michael Hoffman’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which updates the action to 19th-century Tuscany. The sole Shakespeare on the Pfeiffer CV (it is a shame that she hasn’t done more, maybe Gertrude or Volumnia). William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999)
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