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Rise to Fame
She had a deal with McGraw-Hill at 12 for She Was Nice to Mice, a children's book she wrote at a New York school. The acting career came later, through TV bit parts and WarGames (1983), before she landed with the Brat Pack. Her signature role was Allison Reynolds in The Breakfast Club (1985), the goth loner who communicates in dandruff and silence. In a cast where everyone else played a recognizable type, she made the weird kid feel like the most specific person in the room.
In the Spotlight
The Brat Pack years ended and the 1990s weren't kind. She battled addiction and bulimia, went to rehab, and mostly disappeared from the cultural radar. Then High Art (1998) reintroduced her: playing a heroin-addicted lesbian photographer at Sundance, she won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. The work proved she could do something the teen movies never asked of her. She teaches theater at City College of New York, and the Criterion Collection put The Breakfast Club out in 2025. Allison Reynolds turned out to be more durable than the decade that invented her.
Side Notes
She published a poetry collection about addiction and bulimia ('Yesterday I Saw the Sun') in 1991, between her rehab stint and her Hollywood re-entry. Demi Moore reportedly organized the intervention that put her in treatment. She never became a conventional Hollywood actress after the Brat Pack; she kept finding the stranger roles in smaller rooms, which is probably why High Art fit her so well. The goth loner phase wasn't an act.