Molly Ringwald

John Hughes pinned her headshot above his computer and wrote Sixteen Candles around her. She was 15. The Breakfast Club came out a year later, and by 18 she was on the cover of Time magazine, which might be the fastest anyone has ever become a symbol of American adolescence. Hughes kept casting her because nobody else on screen looked like they were actually living through it. She turned down Pretty Woman and Ghost, which tells you she wasn't chasing longevity. She was chasing something smaller and more specific.

When her daughter was 10, Ringwald watched The Breakfast Club with her and couldn't get through it. She wrote about it for The New Yorker in 2018, calling out the sexual harassment in scenes she'd actually lobbied Hughes to cut on set. The essay landed mid-#MeToo and reframed her legacy: she wasn't just the girl who defined teen movies, she was someone who'd been uncomfortable on those sets for years and stayed quiet. Riverdale gave her seven steady seasons on streaming. Ryan Murphy cast her in Feud. The 1980s version of Molly Ringwald is still working, even if she's the one most ambivalent about it.

She recorded her first album at age 6, a Dixieland jazz record with her father's band. Her dad was a blind jazz pianist, which explains a lot about her instincts. When Hollywood's interest waned in the 1990s, she moved to Paris, learned French, acted in French films, and eventually translated two French novels into English. She also shares a birthday with John Hughes, February 18, which she's mentioned more than once as one of those details that makes the whole story feel stranger than it should.