Michelle Pfeiffer has been missed. The actress, 59, dipped in and out of movies as she raised a daughter and son with her husband, the television writer and producer David E. Kelley. Now that her children are grown, she’s returned in a head-snapping way this year: In “The Wizard of Lies,” the HBO movie, she played Ruth Madoff to Robert De Niro’s Bernie; opposite Jennifer Lawrence, she was the houseguest from hell in Darren Aronofsky’s allegorical thriller “Mother!”; and she’s the sexy widow in Kenneth Branagh’s remake of “Murder on the Orient Express,” due Nov. 10.

Sitting cross-legged and barefoot on a couch in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, her Birkenstocks nearby, Ms. Pfeiffer was soft-spoken except for the occasional ripping laugh. Offscreen, she’s a D.I.Y. maven, complete with tool belt; it’s how she grew up. “My dad was a contractor,” she said. “He’d literally give me a hammer and some nails and some piece of wood, and I would just go make something.”

After a memorable turn as Catwoman in the 1992 film “Batman Returns,” she re-enters the comic book universe next year in “Ant-Man and the Wasp.” And she’s singing again too — that’s her voice over the closing credits of Mr. Branagh’s film.

One role she’s not revisiting is producer. Ms. Pfeiffer, who once had a successful production company, is content with acting. Though she never worked with Harvey Weinstein, she was hopeful, she said, that Hollywood would change after the allegations against him. “It has to,” she said.