John Malkovich has spoken for the first time about his affair with Michelle Pfeiffer, three decades after they starred together in Dangerous Liaisons.
The fling is believed to have contributed to the breakdown of both their marriages. Malkovich split from his wife, the late actress Glenne Headly, in 1988 after six years of marriage, while Pfeiffer separated from her husband, actor Peter Horton, shortly afterwards.
Speaking on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, Malkovich reflected on his relationship with Pfeiffer. He said: “It’s not something I’ve ever really talked about. Put it in this way, in the work I do, you make emotional bonds with people very quickly. That’s part of the work. Very rarely, those bonds extend beyond the work.
“For me, she was someone I valued greatly as a colleague, was great fun and moving and with me, incredibly fair. And I certainly wasn’t.”
In the Oscar-winning film, Malkovich played the scheming Vicomte de Valmont, who plots to seduce Pfeiffer’s character Madame de Tourvel, only to fall in love with her. Director Stephen Frears later remarked in 2003 that reality and fiction “intersected” during filming.
Reflecting further, Malkovich said: “A great colleague is rarer than anything. When that relationship becomes more than collegial or more than a friendship – even a profound friendship – then at least in my experience, and it might be my particular psychology or stupidity or ineptness or all of the above… you lose a great colleague.”
Following Dangerous Liaisons, Malkovich went on to become one of Hollywood’s most distinctive actors, starring in Of Mice and Men (1992), Con Air (1997), Being John Malkovich (1999) and Burn After Reading (2008).
On the podcast, he also spoke about his long collaboration with Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite, who he has worked with since the 1990s. He said they remain “great friends” because “there is a line we never crossed.”
After her divorce from Malkovich, Headly married musician Byron McCulloch. She died of a pulmonary embolism in 2017, aged 62.
Malkovich has been in a long-term relationship with Italian production designer Nicoletta Peyran, with whom he shares two children. Pfeiffer, meanwhile, has never commented on rumours of a romance with Malkovich. She divorced Horton in 1990 and, three years later, married TV producer David E. Kelley, with whom she has two children.
