“Life’s a bitch,” snarls Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, avenging anti-hero for the Riot Grrrl era, midway through 1992’s Batman Returns. “Now, so am I.” It may not be her most subtle work, yet there’s something about that brash, bratty aphorism that cuts to the essence of the former SoCal pageant queen turned Hollywood’s most luminous—and perhaps unusual—late 20th-century superstar. The line on Pfeiffer has long been that she had to prove her talent against the limitations, such as they were, of her remarkable looks, but her beauty—and the ways in which she toyed with and subverted it—is inseparable from her craft onscreen. No two Pfeiffer performances are the same, yet each is infused with her gestural flair, her essential humanity, and her empathy for eccentrics and outsiders.

For all of Pfeiffer’s pop culture ubiquity throughout the ’80s and ’90s, few multiplex stars were as elusive, as hard to get a handle on. Though a sex symbol, she was never a femme fatale like Sharon Stone; she could play quirky and romantic, but she wasn’t an American sweetheart like Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan; a serious talent, she was rarely considered in the company of Meryl Streep or Jodie Foster. None of them, of course, could go toe-to-toe in a warehouse with Coolio—as Pfeiffer did, cheekbones tilted to infinity, in the rapper’s iconic music video for “Gangsta’s Paradise”—let alone whip heads off mannequins while shrink-wrapped in a leather cat-suitor hold a live bird captive in their mouth. (Surely the wildest performance in a multi-million-dollar blockbuster with a Happy Meal tie-in.)

Pfeiffer’s unlikely journey from surfer chick to super freak might begin with her childhood relationship to her image. “When I was very young I never thought I was attractive,” the self-described tomboy, nicknamed “Michelle Mudturtle” in elementary school, told Interview in 1988. “I looked like a duck.” Born to working-class parents in Midway City, Orange County, the young, wild-child Pfeiffer spent a listless adolescence hanging out with surfers at Huntington Beach and working a checkout job at Vons, before entering, and winning, the Miss Orange County Beauty Pageant in 1978 (“A softball player who also oil paints, she’d like to become an actress,” announced the emcee). A run of movie and TV bit parts followed, invariably featuring the aspiring starlet in hot pants or padded bras (she was billed only as “The Bombshell” on the 1979 series Delta House). Her first major role arrived in 1982’s ill-fated Grease 2, as the gum-snapping gang leader of the Pink Ladies: sassy in leather and full of bad-girl longing, like Debbie Harry if she’d been a Shangri-La. When the movie flopped, she could barely convince Brian De Palma to cast her in his 1983 remake of Scarface. It turned out to be a career-maker. Gliding into the picture in a bias-cut silk dress as zonked-out trophy wife Elvira Hancock, she’s colder than Giorgio Moroder’s beats, all elbows and doomed malaise: a disdainful, dead-eyed foil to Al Pacino’s hubristic Cuban drug lord. Debuting the killer eye-roll that would become an ace in her arsenal, Pfeiffer’s Elvira is a mistress of the dark whose soul is more corroded than the criminals she’s caught between—a rotted avatar of WASP consumption and American complicity.

Pfeiffer’s performances in both films—sizzling with “don’t call me baby” insouciance—have a sly, comedic edge; she knows when to play off and when to undercut the tough-guy pretense with which she’s surrounded. Still, it would take time before Hollywood recognized the gift beyond the glamor. If George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987)—a pop-feminist whirligig in which Pfeiffer, Cher, and Susan Sarandon summon the devil (Jack Nicholson) to do their bidding—had tapped the actor’s comic abilities and made her a marquee star, then it was Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob (1988) that opened up her full, expressive range as a performer. Outfitted in leopard print, frosted lipstick, and a Long Island accent, Pfeiffer’s low-rent mob princess on the lam sparkles with charisma and screwball timing—not to mention a ferocious right hook, delivered to camera, and by extension, any lingering doubters. The performance showcases Pfeiffer’s keen sense of rhythm, her versatility, and empathy; fusing inventive physical comedy with emotional vulnerability—her posture can sharpen and slacken on a dime—she transforms what might have been a caricature into a rich portrait of a woman stumbling toward a liberating sense of self.