After a five-year absence from the spotlight, actress Michelle Pfeiffer returned to the screen this year with all the familiar talent, beauty, and charisma that transformed the one-time surfer chick into Hollywood royalty.

"I got kind of busy with life," Pfeiffer says of her absence from film, spent raising her children with husband and producer David E. Kelley. "Years went by, and I had to say to myself, ‘I'd better go back and see if I even want to do this anymore.'"

In 2007, the Hollywood veteran reaffirmed her star status in the hit Hairspray and the fantasy flick Stardust, in which she plays a 5,000-year-old hideous witch—a transformation that truly required magic.