Once Pretty in Pink, Now a Lady in Red

By: The Washington Post (2007)

BALTIMORE, MD — Good golly. Molly Ringwald, once pretty in pink, strides through the lobby of the Hippodrome Theatre looking more like a European diva than a vintage all-American teen star. Her sleek black skirt is cut below the knees, and the jacket's large collar is as square as a carton.

It's as if John Hughes's onetime muse has been rummaging through Catherine Deneuve's closet.

But the gum she discreetly works during an interview is pure "Sixteen Candles." So is the tentative, slightly husky laugh and winsome grin as Ringwald (can't we just call her Molly?) explains her lifestyle.

"That's sort of my thing," this tall woman with the tightly pulled-back hair says with a California girl's wry sideways smile. "I do a play, and then I go to Europe."

The work is a musical; by night, Ringwald, 39, shimmies in a little red dress as she headlines the touring revival of "Sweet Charity." It's not her first fling with song and dance. If the 1980s was her Hughes/Hollywood-phenom decade and the 1990s was her expat-in-France decade, she's now well into her New York actress decade. "Charity" follows a number of off-Broadway appearances in plays and musicals and nearly a year as Sally Bowles in Broadway's recent "Cabaret."

Her turn as the adorable dance-hall floozy in "Charity," the 1966 Tony winner by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields (and with a still-reliable book by Neil Simon), reveals only a modest flair for dancing. But she can sing, and apparently always could. Ringwald's blind father plays jazz piano, and when she was small she recorded an album with local jazz talent smitten by the 6-year-old who was warbling Bessie Smith.

"I still own the original masters," Ringwald says, adding that she might rerelease them in conjunction with a children's book. That notion combines two aspects of her life: her 3-year old daughter, Mathilda, and Mathilda's father, writer-editor Panio Gianopoulos, Ringwald's partner of six years, both of whom have been on this nine-month trip with the actress. (The journey ends in June with a vacation to see Mathilda's grandparents in Greece; until then you can follow the "Charity" tour via Gianopoulos's blog.)

And of course, Ringwald can act. In "Charity," playing the Hippodrome through next weekend, she knocks the socks off the bittersweet climax. Pluck and vulnerability were always key to her charm, and when these elements finally cut through the layers of carefree flouncing and a thick New York accent, Ringwald's Charity is radiant.

"Acting's always been really easy for me," she says with a shrug. Don't ask how: "Yeah, I always found it really — I just — I don't know." She smiles again, and manages not to seem ditsy; she's simply confident in her unexamined gift. Talent — especially the kind that arrives without years of grinding — can't always explain itself.

Film critic Pauline Kael put it more succinctly reviewing "Pretty in Pink," which followed "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club" in catapulting Ringwald toward box office heaven and onto the cover of Time: "The poise with which she plunks herself in front of the camera is uncanny."

For Ringwald, the Hughes movies were simple and fun, the best time she's had professionally — even though she's giddier when recalling how she got a part in French director Jean-Luc Godard's late-'80s "King Lear."

"Godard actually came after me," she marvels. "Which is amazing!"

She validates the lore that Hughes wrote "Sixteen Candles" in one weekend with her head shot hanging above his computer, never having met her.

"This is what he actually told me," Ringwald says. "I don't think he'd even seen a movie with me. He just saw my picture." Thus was born a sequence of high school rite-of-passage movies that's hardly been eclipsed by the likes of "American Pie," and which was spoofed in "Not Another Teen Movie" (featuring a cameo by Ringwald herself).

"Baby pictures" is how she regards her teen hits now. Not that she revisits them — "I'm not somebody who lives in the past." But, she says, "once my daughter's the age when she's going to want to see those movies, I think I'll probably — maybe — I'll watch them with her. And that'll be fun because I'll be watching her watching those movies. But the movies themselves — I don't really feel a need to watch them."

Those teen hits were a tough act to follow, as marginally more mature ingenue material such as "Fresh Horses" and "Betsy's Wedding" gave way to a personal and professional period of adjustment.

"I really didn't like my early 20s very much," Ringwald says. "I just really felt very awkward. I kind of felt still like a teenager, but I felt like an adult because I'd been working for so long. And I had more money than kids have at that age, but all my friends had jobs — it was just a very strange time for me."

A job offer swept her to France, and since she'd already packed up everything in Los Angeles, she was free to stay in Europe when the gig was done. Living primarily in France, Ringwald got married and divorced (she doesn't like to talk about that) and made some unremarkable movies on both sides of the ocean. When she moved back to the United States "full time," as she puts it, at the end of the 1990s, she chose to settle in Manhattan. Tinseltown had left a bad taste.

"I don't like being someplace where everybody does the same thing," Ringwald says with an edge in her voice. "And there's a focus in L.A. — it's like being on a very fast treadmill, and everybody's expected to look a certain way, and…you know."

As for her career, she volunteers that she's never been as incredibly driven as an actor. "It's funny because I've been watching 'Entourage' on HBO… and it's kind of amazing to me as an actor when I see somebody who is just — the entire focus is on his career. And his group of friends are all in on this business. It's almost like the Mafia, the family business. And I thought, 'There's something to be said for having a career like that, where everything is just all about the career.' "

Never having been that way herself, she's chosen her comparatively low-key existence in New York and a steady stream of theater work — even as she's kept a foot in Hollywood's door, most recently playing the mother in an "American Girl" movie on TV. Her interests are eclectic; she's dabbled in journalism and book reviews (but never negative reviews — "I will not trash books," she says), and writes fiction and nonfiction when she can.

But spare time has been precious as she's barnstormed in "Sweet Charity."

"I keep joking that I want to get on a television series after this," she laughs. "Something where I play a mom and I come in from time to time and pat the kid on the head and say, 'You'll figure it out' — and leave."

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