Michelle Pfeiffer: Hairspray

Revisiting—or in a few cases, watching for the first time—and celebrating the work of Michelle Pfeiffer, the best actress of my lifetime.

Velma Von Tussle is not exactly a humble woman. She's well aware of her stone-cold foxiness, and wields this power with impunity. She's also a bigot, a sizeist, an all-around vainglorious vixen, and the wicked antagonist in the 2007 film version of Hairspray. Yet while she's certainly well aware of her looks—she declares, "I'm blonde and beautiful" as a simple statement of fact—she sidesteps accusations of bigotry and snobbishness with thudding tone-deafness—"You can say I'm a bigot, but it just isn't true. Look, I love Sammy Davis, and he's black and a Jew!" She's the worst, really, but you still kind of like hating her.

Much of that appeal comes from a memorably delicious performance from the incomparable Michelle Pfeiffer, herself no stranger to stone-cold foxiness. She's spectacular as the villain, a total blonde bombshell, extravagantly done up in sixties-era Jackie O attire and a glorious bouffant hairdo. The role also affords Pfeiffer with ample opportunity to act with three of her best physical assets: her expressive eyes (constantly rolling derisively at every character she interacts with), pouty lips (utilized to their maximum pout potential), and luxurious legs (especially during her scintillating musical numbers). As she did in Grease 2 (1982) and The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), Pfeiffer tackles the musical numbers with great gusto, making them fun and sexy.

The fact that we end up almost liking Velma is all sorts of problematic, but much of it comes down to Pfeiffer's innate charisma—she doesn't sugarcoat Velma's villainy; instead, she revels in it. While we're laughing along with the film's gleefully over-the-top approach to 1960s race relations (thank you, John Waters), Pfeiffer makes it clear that we should be laughing at Velma, not with her. Okay, maybe we're laughing with her a little bit when she sings with panache, "Those poor runner-ups might still hold some grudges. They padded their cups, but I screwed the judges."

That's Velma, living off of past glories of screwing her way to greatness as Miss Baltimore Crab, one judge at a time. In her mind, no other winner can possibly compare. No woman will ever match her devastating combination of scorching hotness and superlative skills at important talents like baton-twirling and acrobatics! That's what makes Pfeiffer's performance so memorable: as hilarious as she is in the film, her acting is always in service of underscoring just how bad Velma really is. She's the worst.

Michelle Pfeiffer, though? She's most certainly the best.