Michelle Pfeiffer: The Secret Singer Who Stole 80s & 90s Movies

For most moviegoers, Michelle Pfeiffer is the icy blonde from Scarface or the whip-cracking Catwoman. Fewer remember that for a stretch in the 80s and 90s, she was also one of Hollywood’s most intriguing singers. From bubblegum rock at Rydell High to smoky jazz standards and a biblical power ballad, Pfeiffer’s film vocals form a mini discography hiding in plain sight.

If you love the music of that era, her singing roles are worth hearing as more than a novelty. Listen closely and you will hear a capable, character-driven vocalist who sometimes outclasses the films around her – and a music career that Hollywood quietly let slip away.

Key singing roles at a glance

Before we dive deep, here is a quick snapshot of Pfeiffer’s major singing work in the 80s and 90s.

First chorus: Grease 2 and the rock n roll apprenticeship

Released in 1982, Grease 2 arrived as the unwanted sequel to a monster hit, saddled with impossible expectations and a much smaller budget. It flopped theatrically, but later found a cult audience that appreciates its camp, its gender-flipped plot, and the way it centers Pfeiffer’s tough, motorbike-obsessed Pink Lady, Stephanie Zinone, rather than a demure good girl in need of a makeover.That cult reevaluation frames the movie very differently from its initial reception.

The soundtrack is wall-to-wall early 60s pastiche, from bowling-alley doo-wop to horny health-class sing-alongs. A devoted fan site highlights ‘Cool Rider’ as Pfeiffer’s signature number, with the track presented as her solo showcase on the original soundtrack, alongside ensemble tunes like ‘Score Tonight’ and ‘We’ll Be Together’.

Decades later, Pfeiffer has admitted she was terrified stepping into a sequel to a beloved musical, worrying that audiences would not see her as attractive enough and that the film would not live up to the original. Yet in the same breath she talks about how much she loved the dancing and singing, and she still keeps her prop bowling ball from the ‘Score Tonight’ sequence as a memento, as she recalled in an interview about those early fears.

Vocally, you can hear an actor still figuring out her instrument. The top notes in ‘Cool Rider’ are a little raw, the phrasing sometimes more actorly than polished-singer smooth. But there is attitude for days – a bright, cutting tone that slices through the backing vocals, a rock edge on consonants, and a surprisingly strong sense of rhythm for someone who swears she was not a singer.

In a way, Grease 2 is Pfeiffer’s garage band phase, preserved on film. The movie may be messy, but her vocals feel like the one element that would not be out of place on an actual early 80s pop record. If you strip away the choreography and day-glo costumes and just listen, the performance holds up far better than the film’s reputation suggests.

The smoky jazz revelation: The Fabulous Baker Boys

Seven years later, Pfeiffer returned to singing on screen in a very different register. In The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), she plays Susie Diamond, an ex-escort who muscles her way into a failing lounge-piano duo and saves the act with a cigarette-hazed voice and an even hazier moral compass. Behind the scenes she recorded all her own vocals, with no double, and drilled them in long studio days before lip-syncing on set, a fact emphasized in production trivia about the film.

The official soundtrack credits her on two pivotal tracks, a languid, late-night version of ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ and a close-miked, intimate ‘My Funny Valentine’, both set against Dave Grusin‘s jazz arrangements. They sit in the middle of a score otherwise dominated by instrumental jazz and vintage recordings, which only makes her entries jump out more.

Getting Pfeiffer from Grease-kid energy to convincing lounge singer took serious craft. Grusin brought in veteran session vocalist Sally Stevens to coach her; they worked two hours a day for five to six weeks at Pfeiffer’s home, shaping a sound modeled on Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy and Blossom Dearie, but scaled down to fit an amateur who might plausibly be working Holiday Inn circuits, as detailed in a retrospective on the film’s production. By the time cameras rolled, she was performing seven full or partial standards in character, not just the two that made the album.

Cast and crew later recalled that Susie’s audition song ‘More Than You Know’ required take after take until Pfeiffer was happy, and that Jeff Bridges even bet her she would be offered a record contract on the strength of the film. According to one reunion piece with the cast, she did receive an offer yet walked away from it, pocketing the bragging rights and leaving the money – and a potential parallel career – on the table.

On screen, all that preparation crystallizes in the now-notorious ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ sequence, where Susie, in a red velvet dress, slowly prowls across Jack Baker’s grand piano during a New Year’s Eve gig. A Seattle critic celebrating the film’s 30th anniversary singled out that moment as the scene everyone remembers: Pfeiffer half-singing, half-breathing the lyric while Jeff Bridges grins at the keys, knowing exactly how dangerous the chemistry has become.

For musicians, Susie Diamond is practically a masterclass in character singing. Pfeiffer leans behind the beat, drags consonants like she is too tired to finish them, and uses a narrow dynamic range that only explodes on key phrases. She does not sing like a conservatory-trained jazz vocalist; she sings like someone who has learned to weaponize a decent voice in smoky rooms where nobody is really listening until you make them. That choice is what makes the performance feel dangerous rather than pretty.

• Notice how rarely she belts; her power comes from restraint and timing.
• She treats lyrics as story beats, not just rhyme schemes, adjusting tone as Susie gains confidence and then loses it.
• She lets flaws stay in – breath noise, slight rasp – which sells the idea that this is live, not polished studio fantasy.

Plenty of actors have carried tunes, but very few have built such a fully musical character from scratch. If Grease 2 was the demo tape, The Fabulous Baker Boys is the fully produced LP we never quite got.

Out of the lounge and into the desert: The Prince of Egypt

After Baker Boys, Pfeiffer mostly parked her singing while she racked up a run of prestige dramas and unforgettable villains. Her next substantial vocal role came not in a club but in ancient Midian, when DreamWorks cast her as Tzipporah in the animated musical The Prince of Egypt. Fan and production sources agree that she handled both the speaking and singing for the character, and biographical overviews of her career note that she also recorded the film’s main theme ‘When You Believe’, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Most listeners know ‘When You Believe’ from the radio-friendly Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston duet, but in the film itself the song begins as an intimate, almost private anthem sung by Tzipporah and Moses’s sister Miriam as the Hebrew people step into freedom. A later piece on the song’s legacy points out that, in the movie, it is that quieter version – voiced by Pfeiffer and singer Sally Dworsky – that carries the emotional weight before the pop-diva fireworks kick in over the end credits.

Pfeiffer’s work here is more modest than Susie Diamond’s showstoppers, but it reveals another side to her voice. The tone is cleaner, the vibrato narrower, the phrasing closer to classic film-musical earnestness than to jazz seduction. Yet you can still hear the same instinct for character: this is a desert woman who has suffered and survived, not a Broadway belter doing vocal acrobatics. For a generation that wore out VHS copies of Dangerous Minds and only half-registered the soundtrack credits, discovering her name on this ballad can be a genuine surprise.

The great what if: a singer Hollywood let slip

By the end of the 90s, Michelle Pfeiffer had quietly checked off three very different musical boxes: teen pop musical, smoke-filled jazz drama, animated epic. She had a Grammy-winning arrangement built around her voice, an Oscar-nominated acting performance anchored in song, and a piece of an Academy Award winning theme. That is more than many professional singers manage across an entire career.

Yet she never cut a solo album, never took the logical step into adult-contemporary records or a jazz standards set that would have fit comfortably alongside peers like Linda Ronstadt or Carly Simon. Part of that seems to be temperament: in interviews she repeatedly downplays her singing, insisting she is an actress who sings when a role demands it, not a singer who acts.

You could argue that Hollywood also dropped the ball. The industry loves a marketable narrative, and Pfeiffer refusing to play the obvious ‘movie star becomes pop star’ game made her harder to package. Instead of betting on an actress with real interpretive chops and a distinctive timbre, the labels chased safer, younger, more conventional voices and left one of the era’s most interesting screen vocalists to treat singing as an occasional side quest.

Final chorus: why these performances still matter

For listeners who grew up in the 50s through the 90s, Pfeiffer’s singing roles map neatly onto familiar musical worlds: girl-group flavored rock in Grease 2, small-combo jazz and standards in The Fabulous Baker Boys, and the big inspirational ballad tradition represented by ‘When You Believe’. Taken together, they form a kind of accidental concept album about a woman growing from restless teenager to world-weary lounge singer to spiritual matriarch.

If you only know her as a brilliant actress, treat these films like crate-digging. Spin ‘Cool Rider’ and listen past the choreography. Revisit ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ with a musician’s ear for time and tone. Put on the film version of ‘When You Believe’ and pay attention before the closing-credits diva duet begins. Somewhere in there is the career of a singer Hollywood never fully pursued – and that makes these scattered tracks all the more precious.