Where to Start With Molly Ringwald

It's not The Breakfast Club

Molly Kathleen Ringwald burst onto the scene in the early 1980s as America’s perky teen sweetheart, but her story, and her career, are far richer (and sometimes darker) than that high-school detention flick suggests. Born in 1968 in Roseville, California, Ringwald grew up in a showbiz household. Her mother Adele Frembd was a cook and her father Bob Ringwald a blind jazz pianist. By age five she was already acting (appearing in Alice in Wonderland on stage) and at six she cut a full Dixieland jazz album (“Molly Sings: I Wanna Be Loved by You” with her father’s band). A Disneyland patriotic album followed when she was 11, and she even had early TV roles: young Molly Parker on Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life (1979–80) before being suddenly cut during the show’s cast shake-up. In short, by the time she was 13 Ringwald was a seasoned performer: child actress, singer, dancer and student of life in Los Angeles.

Brat-Pack Breakouts and Iconic Hughes Flicks

Her big break came thanks to Chicago writer-director John Hughes. Hughes famously spotted Ringwald’s headshot and wrote Sixteen Candles (1984) around what he imagined her character to be. The film made her a breakout star. Her Golden Globe–nominated debut as Samantha Baker (the girl whose 16th birthday is forgotten by her family) immediately endeared her to millions. Overnight, Ringwald became emblematic of 1980s teen angst. She reprised the role of the vulnerable Everygirl in Hughes’s next two films, Claire Standish in The Breakfast Club (1985) and Andie Walsh in Pretty in Pink (1986), cementing her image as the sensitive, fashion-forward “it girl” of the era. By 1986 she was everywhere. The media put her on the cover of Time magazine (May 26, 1986) to represent teen culture, and she was lumped in with the so-called Brat Pack of young stars, even though she later joked she wasn’t really one of that crew. But I’ll touch on that later.

Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink were massive hits and became part of Gen X culture and film mythology. Claire’s couture prom dress, Samantha’s awkward candlelit party, and Andie’s bubble-gum pop of pink, these images defined a generation. For reference: Sixteen Candles earned Ringwald a Young Artist Award for Best Young Actress, and The Breakfast Club still sits in the Criterion Collection decades later.) Hughes’s films were sui generis. No one was writing such teen stories from a young woman’s POV at the time, so Ringwald became Hollywood’s default “girl next door.” Yet even then she knew it wasn’t all rosy: she later quipped that in reality she was “figuring out who I was, too” and that being “projected as this perfect, sweet American girl next door” was actually quite a burden.

Beyond the Big Three: Later Films and TV Ventures

Of course, Ringwald did plenty outside of that trilogy. After Pretty in Pink, she started seeking “darker” or more grown‑up roles, but Hollywood mostly held on to her teen image. She did branch out in the late 1980s leading a drama about teenage pregnancy (For Keeps, 1988), co-starring with Robert Downey Jr. in the romantic comedy The Pick-up Artist (1987), and even dabbling in some cult horror territory (House of the Devil, 2009) and weird indies (King Cobra, 2016). On television she played roles as varied as a suicidal teen (Surviving: A Family in Crisis, 1985) and a journalist (Something to Live For: The Alison Gertz Story, 1992). The latter an AIDS-themed TV movie for which she won critical praise. In 1994 she led Stephen King’s miniseries The Stand and tried sitcom life on Townies (1996). After Sixteen Candles, she even turned down Hughes’s Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) because she felt it was just “too similar” to her other roles. This was a decision she later laughed at, confessing on NPR, “I got typecast anyway… so I should have just kept working with him”. Yes, she should have, but the film was great anyway.