Michelle Pfeiffer and Fisher Stevens’s Relationship Timeline: A Look Back

Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Pfeiffer and actor-director Fisher Stevens were an unlikely couple when they began dating in 1989. Pfeiffer acknowledged that Stevens wasn't "your standard leading-man type," but who cares. 

"I adore him," she told People in 1992. 

More than that, though, during the roughly four years they were together, these two complemented each other — and we're not just referring to their matching haircuts and coordinated John Lennon sunglasses moments (see photos below).

Stevens pushed Pfeiffer out of her comfort zone, encouraging her to travel with him despite her objections. 

"He's exhausting," the Henry Rose founder joked to Rolling Stone in 1992. "He lives out of a suitcase; he loves to travel. He's comfortable wherever he is, and I'm SO the opposite. I'd never leave my house in Los Angeles if it weren't for my work and for him. I'm a creature of habit, really; I don't like change much. And that's why I chose him."

Here's a look back at Michelle Pfeiffer and Fisher Stevens's relationship.

1989: Michelle Pfeiffer and Fisher Stevens first meet

The Los Angeles Times reported that Pfeiffer and Stevens met in 1989 when they both starred in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Twelfth Night.

Per her 1992 People cover story, the early days of the pair's relationship were marked by a less-than-romantic trip to Paris. Stevens's Short Circuit 2 director, Kenneth Johnson, said that the actor fell "violently ill" as soon as they arrived. However, the setback only brought them closer. 

"I remember him saying that she was terrific ... about the illness," Johnson added.

According to the L.A. Times, the couple remained "bi-coastal" throughout the relationship — as Stevens was a "die-hard New Yorker" and Pfeiffer was based in L.A. 

"I should buy something here," she told Rolling Stone while on a trip to New York City. "I mean, it's only fair at this point."

1992: Michelle Pfeiffer visits Fisher Stevens on the set of Super Mario Bros.

During her Rolling Stone interview, Pfeiffer pointed to a lizard sketched on the wall of the restaurant she was dining in and said, "He's with me even now," referring to Stevens, who at the time was shooting the Super Mario Bros. movie in which he played a lizard-like character named Iggy.

But the lizard thing gets weirder.

Decades later, the (widely panned) Super Mario Bros. movie retained something of a cult following. One of the film's stars, Richard Edson, shared an anecdote with Kotaku in 2011 about when Pfeiffer visited Stevens on set and developed a fixation with a certain reptile.

"I do remember Fisher was going out with Michelle Pfeiffer at the time, and she would come down to visit, but she was a very kind of shy, introverted person," Edson recalled. "One of Fisher's lizards was sick, so that became her 'project.' She took care of the lizard and took him to town to veterinarians and spent all day finding a veterinarian in the area who specialized in lizards."

He continued, "She took him all over, and I was like, 'Woah, a little obsessive,' but she was a sweet girl, but I guess she always had to have something to do, and that was her thing, to take care of the lizard. To heal it."

September 1992: Michelle Pfeiffer and Fisher Stevens break up

Near the end of 1992, Pfeiffer and Stevens went their separate ways. "I'm hurting. I'm a raw wound," Stevens reportedly told People, per Deseret News, after the split. "There were tensions," he said in regard to the "why."

In 1993, Pfeiffer adopted her daughter, Claudia, and met her second husband, primetime heavyweight David E. Kelley. Pfeiffer told Parade in 2012 that her decision to adopt was her saying, "To hell with figuring out the man thing before I start a family."

"I really, really wanted to have kids, and I think my desperation to do that was messing up my relationships," she continued. "It was skewing my perceptions, causing me to judge things too harshly or maybe deciding they were better than they were. Finally I thought, 'Wait a minute! I don't have to have a man to become a mother.' It was like a lightbulb went on."

The pressures of their respective careers may have played a part as well. Stevens called the distance necessitated by their lifestyles "difficult" and said the media attention Pfeiffer received was "completely overwhelming," reported People in 1992.

"You do all of this acting stuff, and then you get in the press for being somebody's boyfriend," Stevens explained to the L.A. Times in 1991. "And for some reason, the press like to call me 'geeky' and all of that stuff."