Cinema blew its cool in the 1980s. Stephen Spielberg was king of the world, his kindergarten schmaltz supplanting the simmering fury of 1970s trailblazers Coppola and Scorsese. Amid the Styrofoam dialogue, John Hughes's maudlin high-school comedies sounded a diffident note. Bittersweet and humane, Hughes's films gave us Molly Ringwald, a china-doll kook who blossomed into the biggest teenage star on the block. Lazily lumped with the 1980s Bratpack, Ringwald possessed a porcelain vulnerability that inspired a generation of adolescent crushes and landed her on the cover of Time magazine.
Born in Roseville, California in 1968, Ringwald was the daughter of blind jazz pianist Bob Ringwald. At the age of six she recorded a jazz album, I Wanna Be Loved By You, and Molly Sings, and two years later landed a place on Disney's New Mickey Mouse Club (forerunner of the Disney Club, spawning ground of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera). By 1982, she had fronted a west-coast production of Annie, starred in the short-lived NBC sitcom The Facts of Life and appeared in an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
In 1983, Hughes cast her in his first significant hit, Sixteen Candles. As Samantha, a muddled geek plunged into crisis on her 16th birthday, Ringwald blew audiences away with her subtle blend of fragile and sassy. The Breakfast Club, Hughes's 1985 high-water mark tale of anguished teen losers, sealed her reputation as pubescent angst's pouting princess.
We weren't to know it at the time, but Pretty in Pink, Ringwald's final 1986 Hughes collaboration, would be her swansong. Distinguished by a rollicking soundtrack crammed with "edgy" acts such as Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order, this slight, amiable love story saw the duo covering old ground to diminishing returns.
Fatally typecast, Ringwald, still only 33, has struggled to establish an identity away from her mentor. Bit parts in straight-to-video hooey such as Malicious and Face the Music pay the bills. She recently threatened an unlikely comeback with Townies, a Roseanne-tinged sitcom, before calamitous ratings led NBC to cancel the show mid-season.
Irony may prove her salvation. Dawson's Creek svengali Kevin Williamson, who has built a career on artlessly aping Hughes, has cast her alongside her spiritual successor Katie Holmes in the forthcoming Killing Mrs Tingle. For most of us, however, she will forever be that gawky kid in baggy smock and smeared lipstick.
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