9 hours Ago By Justin Harp
The Breakfast Club created a whole new generation of stars when it became a box office smash in February 1985. Molly Ringwald , Ally Sheedy , Emilio Estevez , Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson were dubbed members of “The Brat Pack” because of their iconic portrayals of high school students stuck in a Saturday detention with a curmudgeonly vice principal ( Paul Gleason ). The Brat Pack were thrown into the dizzying heights of Hollywood superstardom, where their love lives became national news even as some of the crew were still teenagers.
Throughout the 1980s, Brat Pack membership would expand to include the likes of Demi Moore , Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jr. and they’d go on to star together in other hit 1980s comedies such as Weird Science , The Outsiders and Pretty in Pink , to name only a few. As The Breakfast Club celebrates its 40th anniversary on Saturday, February 15, keep scrolling for a rundown of the cast’s families and relationships: Molly Ringwald Ringwald was already a star on the rise by the time writer-director John Hughes ‘ The Breakfast Club was released, as she’d previously appeared in Hughes’ 1984 hit romantic comedy Sixteen Candles .
The actress, who was just 16 while filming The Breakfast Club , was romantically linked to musician Dweezil Zappa , son of music icon Frank Zappa , and rapper Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys throughout the 1980s. Ringwald stepped away from Hollywood by the early 1990s to study French while living in Paris. She had previously attended a French immersion school, the Lycée Français de Los Angeles, before becoming a teen superstar.
In a 1994 interview, Ringwald said she first seriously considered moving to France after filming the 1987 avant garde movie King Lear with influential French director Jean-Luc Godard . “I went to Paris a couple of years ago to work,” Ringwald told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “I was just so happy there.
It was during the summer and the sun goes down at 10 at night. The whole city just seemed alive. I wanted to see what it felt like living outside of America and get a different perspective.
” Related: The Brat Pack Photos Through the Years: From the '80s to Now Ringwald married French writer Valéry Lameignère on July 28, 1999 in Bordeaux, France, but they divorced only three years later. She would subsequently wed book editor Panio Gianopoulos in 2007, with the couple welcoming three children together. Their first child, a daughter named Mathilda, was born in 2003, followed by fraternal twins, daughter Adele Georgiana and son Roman Stylianos, in 2009.
In 2018, Ringwald looked back on showing her classic ’80s movies to her children in spite of some problematic elements. ( Sixteen Candles , in particular, has been criticized for its stereotypical and potentially offensive depictions of race and attitudes toward sex.) “I feel like that’s what makes the movies really wonderful, and it’s also something I wanted to go on record talking about — the elements that I find troubling and that I want to change for the future,” she told Andy Cohen .
“But that doesn’t mean at all that I want them to be erased. I’m proud of those movies, and I have a lot of affection for them. They’re so much a part of me.
” Ally Sheedy Sheedy was in her 20s by the time she played high school outcast Allison Reynolds in The Breakfast Club and had a breakthrough performance a year prior in 1983’s WarGames , opposite Matthew Broderick and Dabney Coleman . Following The Breakfast Club’ s release, Sheedy was in a high-profile romance with Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora for a year. She later told The Los Angeles Times that she sought treatment for abusing Halcion, Xanax and antidepressants after their split.
“Things change when you fall in love with someone. For all his problems. And I was in love with that guy,” she said in 1998.
“It was a key relationship in my life, not his. It destroyed me. I ended up in a lot of trouble.
” Sheedy continued. “As smart as you can be, there are a lot of things you can only learn through painful experience. I started taking drugs to be with him [Sambora] on his level and in his world.
It not only relieved the anxiety of being with him but also helped me to deal with someone who’s behaving horribly toward me.” Related: Andrew McCarthy and Emilio Estevez’s Rift Revealed in 'Brats': Revelations Sambora denied any accusation that he used drugs, calling Sheedy’s claims “ludicrous and false.” In 1992, Sheedy married actor David Lansbury , the nephew of the late Murder, She Wrote star Angela Lansbury , and their son Beckett was born in 1994.
The couple filed for divorce in 2008. The St. Elmo’s Fire star shared in 2022 that Beckett had come out as a trans male in his teens, and reflected on what she’d learned from his journey.
“Beck doesn’t hide anything,” she told People . “And I feel very comfortable talking to anyone whose kid is just beginning the process of transition. Parents need to educate themselves.
” “It’s natural to have fears about your kids, no matter what. But in this case, Beck is in a really great place in his life. I give him the room to run, and I just really try to just watch.
” Emilio Estevez Estevez, who played troubled jock Andrew Clark in The Breakfast Club , comes from one of Hollywood’s most famous families as the son of The West Wing ‘s Martin Sheen and actress Janet Sheen , and brother of actors Charlie Sheen , Ramon Estevez and Renée Estevez . Early in his career Emilio dated actress Mimi Rogers and then made headlines for an on-set romance with St. Elmo’s Fire costar Demi Moore between 1984 and 1986.
In a 1986 interview, Moore spoke about the experience of working with Emilio on his directorial debut Wisdom . “He really allowed me to be part of the team from the very beginning,” Moore told KCRA 3 . “I was always encouraged to contribute to my character, on casting, I was allowed to go on location scouts.
Really, just throughout the whole thing, he really shared every part of the process that he was going through.” The couple were briefly engaged but called it quits before marrying. Moore would later write in her 2019 memoir, Inside Out , that she called off her wedding to Emilio after a friend spotted him out with another woman.
“Emilio and I in fact just mailed out the invitations for our wedding when a friend told me she had seen him out with someone else in LA,” Moore wrote. “He denied it, of course, but I was having a hard time trusting him: during a two-week breakup a few months before, he’d slept with an ‘ex’ girlfriend, lied about it and then forced to tell me the truth when he found out she was pregnant.” Emilio moved on with model Carey Salley , with whom he had a son and a daughter, Taylor and Paloma, in 1984 and 1986, respectively.
By 1992, Emilio married pop superstar and choreographer Paula Abdul but their union was short-lived, as they filed for divorce in 1994. During the couple’s brief marriage, Emilio told E! News in 1992 that he was drawn to Abdul’s “silly sense of humor.” “We find the simplest things funny,” he said.
“We spend a lot of our time just laughing, just giggling. We’re like a couple of kids. It’s a very special thing.
” The actor was subsequently engaged to winemaker Sonja Magdevski from 2006 to 2015. Anthony Michael Hall Hall confirmed to Us Weekly in June 2024 that he’d had a fling with Ringwald while they were filming The Breakfast Club in 1984. “One of the funniest things that happened during the making of The Breakfast Club was Molly Ringwald cornering me in the school hallway to tell me she had a big crush on me,” Hall told Us .
“We ended up dating. One could say, my character, Brian Johnson, actually got the girl in the end.” Many years later, he was linked to Dead Zone costar Sandra Guerard from 2001 to 2006 and journalist Diana Falzone from 2009 to 2010.
Falzone got a temporary restraining order against Hall following their split in 2009 and police were later called to her apartment over allegations of a violent argument. Hall’s representatives denied Falzone’s accusations , calling them “erroneous.” Hall subsequently married The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time actress Lucia Oskerova in 2020 and they welcomed a son, Michael Anthony Hall II, in 2023.
“It’s great. We’re excited. That first month of parenting is pretty wild,” Hall told People at the time.
“Everything that everybody tells you is pretty true: you lose sleep and it’s the craziest time, but it’s the best time. So we’re really enjoying it.” Judd Nelson Nelson was linked to Beverly Hills 90210 star Shannen Doherty in 1993 and while they split soon after, he was one of many who publicly supported Doherty during her fight with stage 4 cancer.
“She’s a real survivor. I mean, I don’t know if that’s a good thing sometimes,” Nelson exclusively told Us Weekly in March 2024. “Because she’s going to fight it.
You know what I mean? It’s like, I really have great empathy for her and I really wish her the best.” Tragically, Doherty died in July 2024 at age 53 following a lengthy battle with the disease. Nelson, who also dated former Playboy model Sheila Lussier from 2003 to 2005, was one of the few Brat Pack members who declined to take part in Andrew McCarthy ‘s acclaimed documentary Brats , about the group’s struggles and successes.
Thank You! You have successfully subscribed. By signing up, I agree to the Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive emails from Us Weekly Check our latest news in Google News Check our latest news in Apple News “It seems strange to have that subject matter be something for edited entertainment,” Nelson, confirmed to Us Weekly in March 2024. “Also, like, he’s a nice guy, but I hadn’t seen him in 35 years.
And it’s like, I’m not going to [be] like, ‘Hey!’ No, dude.” He went on: “I don’t even know who’s in the Brat Pack. It’s like, why kind of rebirth something that wasn’t necessarily fun? .
.. How can we be experts on something that didn’t ever really exist?” The Breakfast Club is available to stream now on AMC+, Prime Video, Apple TV+ and YouTube Premium.
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