Good golly, Miss Molly! - actress Molly Ringwald - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1999 by Katie Holmes

People still thrill to the name Molly Ringwald. Whereas most teen superstars lose it when the fame thing's over, she found, a life - a real life - and timed herself until the moment was right for the next big chapter in her career. That moment is now. We didn't have to coax Katie Holmes - who is to the '90s what Molly was to the '80s - to ask the questions

In Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986), three films from the John Hughes stable, Molly Ringwald gave effortlessly appealing performances that raised her to the status of bona fide teen icon. The potency and popularity of her image endures, for Ringwald - cool, smart, paprika-haired - was both an original and authentically postadolescent. Every "as if" and "yeah, right"-deadpanning screen teen of the '90s owes a huge debt to her.

Ringwald duly segued into the adult world of James Toback's The Pick-up Artist (1987) and the rarefied one of Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987). based mostly in France, she has since worked consistently in films and television without calling attention to herself. But she was a hit In the L.A. production of How I Learned to Drive, had some funny moments in the recent Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and - with four films in the can (Kimberly, Hearts and Bones, The Giving Tree, Cut) - the thirty-one-year-old, newly married actress seems set to charm us again. We invited Katie Holmes to talk to her Tingle colleague about her life and times.

KATIE HOLMES: OK, Molly, are you ready to start?

MOLLY RINGWALD: I'm all ready. [laughs]

KH: [laughs] I'm so nervous.

MR: I interviewed John Hughes like this once and I remember I was nervous about that. Just go for it.

KH: All right. What for you were some of the positive and negative sides of being a star at the age of sixteen?

MR: They're probably the same things you're going through yourself. I guess the hardest aspect was that it became difficult to relate to people my own age. Because I was playing a typical teenager, I should have been completely in tune with typical teenage experiences, but in fact, mine were completely different. So that was awkward, but the whole thing was also incredible, too. I wouldn't have given it up because I learned a lot and had a really good time.

KH: When you were on the cover of Time magazine, did you think that kind of fame would be hard to live up to?

MR: This will sound like I was naive, but I didn't realize how important it was. I was still reading Seventeen and when they put me on the cover I thought that was the best.

KH: When everything comes at you at once, it can be really overwhelming.

MR: Yeah, it was a bit of a whirlwind. You must feel that sometimes, don't you?

KH: It's surreal. You kind of sit back and go, "Uh, OK." It actually seems like everyone around you is more involved in it than you are yourself.

MR: Absolutely. And you have to know when to tell them to calm down. It also takes a little while to figure out who you can listen to and who you can't. I'm lucky that I have really great parents, and I understand you do, too. It gives you a real backbone to have them there because you know you're going to get the truth from them and that they don't have ulterior motives. But of course, you still end up making mistakes by thinking somebody's really great when they're not.

KH: I would imagine you probably had an easier time in the maturing process of weeding people out because of your experiences as a teenager.

MR: I mean, it took me a while, but I tried not to get cynical because I realized that wasn't going to make me happy. I always tried to be as open to as many people as I could be, and if they proved me wrong, then free. That's being innocent until proven guilty. [laughs]

KH: How do you feel now about being an icon of the '80s?

MR: For a few years I hated it because it made me feel old before my time, but now I'm flattered. I'm really proud of the films I made when I was a teenager.

KH: As you should be.

MR: Thank you. And I think that they are going to go in and out of fashion. Right now, they happen to be in fashion, but maybe in a few years they won't be.

KH: In which of your early films do you think you gave your best performances?

MR: I would say the John Hughes films. Even though they were different, they were made so much in the same style that they blended into one for me. Breakfast Club is probably my favorite because it's sort of perfect. [laughs] No, it's not perfect, but it was beautifully made and all the actors worked well together. Then I am really proud of my performance in a television movie called Surviving [1985].

KH: Was moving to France a deliberate decision you made to get away from Hollywood?

MR: No, it was haphazard. I went there to work and fell in love with Paris. Living in L.A. you start to think that nothing else exists outside this microcosm you're in. At least that's how I felt, and when I went to Paris I felt I could breathe for the first time in a long time. It was like I'd been underwater and finally I'd surfaced. I thought, If I feel this good I have to experience it for a while. But it wasn't something I decided beforehand.