“The whole storyline with Caroline, that didn’t have anything to do with my character,” she says. In Sixteen Candles, for instance, one of the characters trades his drunk girlfriend to his friend, who gets to have sex with her in exchange for a pair of knickers he has stolen off someone else. I had my parents around and I felt like they were very protective of me.” Yet each film has subplots and moments of misogyny, from subtle to breathtaking. Even her mum was heard, when she objected to bog-standard sexist content.
In many ways, these films were original and subversive. “Muse” is an overworked word, freighted with patriarchal cliches (the genius auteur who needs a beautiful, young, quiet woman to trigger his creativity), but John Hughes, whose films Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles revolutionised teen cinema in the mid-80s, was clearly writing his female leads for the teenage Ringwald. Predators in Hollywood trying to get off with 13-year-olds is different from the ambient misogyny of the industry, but not unrelated. There were certain things that were accepted that just wouldn’t be accepted now.” Today, she describes it in broad terms as “a different time. They just went the extra step that they didn’t need to go She was happy to be part of something that was daring. When I was 14, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set.” Once, she complained to her agent about an audition in which she was forced to wear a dog collar he laughed and told her to save it for her memoirs. “When I was 13, a 50-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection. She wrote about this in the New Yorker in 2017, at the start of the #MeToo movement. Yet having been in showbiz since 1978 – she had her first stage role when she was 10, having already recorded a Dixieland jazz album with her father, a jazz pianist – Ringwald has had her own brushes with “the other Weinsteins”.
#Contour next one movie
Translating this work has made her relieved afresh that the movie never came off. Years after Last Tango, Ringwald met Bertolucci when she was attached to The Queen’s Gambit and he was lined up to direct it (the co-creator of the Netflix series, Allan Scott, originally wanted to make it as a film). I didn’t know anything about her other work, or her as a person.” “As a teenager, when I thought about that film, that’s all I thought about.
“I feel like I knew Maria Schneider originally just by ‘butter’ ,” she says. It eclipsed the rest of her career, in a way that it didn’t anyone else’s. The crowning injustice is not that Bertolucci and Brando made a fortune from the film, and Schneider very little, but that she ended up as the punchline of the piece, all the innuendo loaded on her. I feel like he said what he felt he was supposed to say.” “So he did, but if you see his different interviews, his story changes. “I think he knew he had to atone, to say something,” says Ringwald. I wanted the reaction of a girl, not of an actress.’ And that’s not right.”īertolucci’s casual denigration of Schneider – she couldn’t possibly act humiliated he had to make sure that she was humiliated – makes it hard to take seriously any of the penitence he expressed in later years. “Even though there was no actual penetration, he set up a rape, because she didn’t consent to that,” she says. Bertolucci didn’t tell her the plot until just before filming: that Marlon Brando’s character was going to anally rape hers.
Schneider was 19 when they shot the film. Photograph: Neville Marriner/Daily Mail/Shutterstock She looks like a film star playing an academic who was in the middle of reading something more interesting, but is patient enough to break off to talk to me for a bit. Then her face appears: as camera-ready and photogenic at 55 as it was in the mid-80s when her career took off, but also relaxed, thoughtful, bespectacled. “I don’t want to do that,” she says, drily. It doesn’t matter, I say: just tell me what you look like. Then the pandemic hit.Īt the start of our video call, her camera isn’t working. Because I feel like I understood her.” It was just that she originally didn’t have time. “I felt my experience as an actor would only bring more to the project.
#Contour next one series
“The opposite,” she says, speaking to me from Vancouver, where she is filming the supernatural drama series Riverdale. Nor was it that she felt too close to the industry to tackle the life story of such a tragic figure. It’s not that she wasn’t interested in the late French actor, whose life was so horribly defined and dominated by Last Tango in Paris. W hen Molly Ringwald was first approached to translate My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider, she said no.
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