This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
The actor and writer talks to Shondaland about translating “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” Vanessa Schneider’s reverent book of essays, from French to English, and what she’s up to next.
Courtesy of PR
Sometimes, life really does imitate art. Having evolved from a celluloid teen poster girl of the ’80s with leading roles in The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink to a real-life mother of three teens who also plays a mother of teens on TV and in films, it’s no wonder Molly Ringwald refers to herself jokingly as “teen Buddha.” It’s a phase of life that has perpetually informed her life and work — or so it seems.
On screen, Ringwald played a mom (and grandmother!) in the 2008-launched series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and now, in her latest film, Netflix’s The Kissing Booth 3 (premiering August 11) — which continues the pre-college chronicles of Elle, Noah, and Lee — she plays a sage mom of teen boys. “It’s a nice feel-good movie, and I think that’s sort of what everybody needs right now,” Ringwald tells Shondaland. She describes the shoot in South Africa as a real-life family affair — she got to bring her own family along, as spending time with her own teens is always a priority. “Being a parent takes a great deal of time and focus,” Ringwald says.
This content is imported from youTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
Outside of her own family, Ringwald also consistently demonstrates a vested interest in the welfare of our young people in general. Which is why she’s recently taken on the role of spokesperson for the MenACWY vaccine campaign, a two-part vaccine that protects teens against bacterial meningitis. “I just want to make sure the parents are aware of the vaccine and get their kids vaccinated before they go off to college,” Ringwald explains, “to make sure that they’re really fully protected against meningococcal disease, which is rare but potentially life-threatening. If they survive it, they can have lifelong disabilities attached to it.”
The cause resonates with Ringwald personally, not just because she has three teens of her own, but because she suffered from a form of meningitis herself when she was college age. “I did have meningitis as a teenager, and I did survive it,” Ringwald says, “but I really wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. I was very, very sick, but very lucky, so when they approached me about being a possible spokesperson, it just really made sense to me. Bacterial meningitis is life-threatening. Viral meningitis [which she had] can be life-threatening as well, but bacterial meningitis progresses very quickly, before parents even know what it is. They can think, ‘Oh, it’s just the flu; it’s just a headache,’ and before they even get the medical care, they can lose their child.”
As much as we can make of Ringwald’s important roles — both real-world and otherwise — in teen life, what you might not know about her own life is that she’s something of a Renaissance woman. Ringwald has been acting for decades, sure, but she’s also a talented singer, having starred in Broadway’s Cabaret in 2001 and the 2006 tour of Sweet Charity, and released a jazz album, Except Sometimes, in 2013. Ringwald is also a published author — she’s written a 2012 novel of linked short stories, When It Happens to You, and a 2011 nonfiction tome of middle-aged encouragement/self-discovery called Getting the Pretty Back.
Impressively, Ringwald’s lifelong love affair with the French language led to yet another gig as a French-to-English translator of novels. She first translated 2017’s Lie With Me, a best-selling novel by Philippe Besson, and a second book-translation project helped Ringwald kill time during lockdown. “It was kind of a perfect thing to do when you’re locked down because it’s very time-consuming, and it takes a lot of focus,” Ringwald explains. “For me, it was a little bit like doing a giant puzzle.”
Translating has become an unexpected sideline gig for Ringwald, whose book editor suggested it. “I thought, well, why not? I’m somebody who really never says no to a challenge,” Ringwald says. “I feel like it really improved my spoken French a lot, and then I found that I actually really liked it. I don’t know how many more I’m going to do, but we’ll see.”
Ringwald’s love of the French language began with her mom’s obsession with Julia Child. “I’ve always been a bit of a Francophile. My mom was a huge Julia Child fan when I was growing up and sort of a voracious cookbook reader and collector — that was really her idol,” Ringwald explains. “We would talk about French cuisine a lot. As I got older, I really became interested in French cinema, you know, Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut. Then I moved to France, so now I have this very personal connection to it.”
While in France, where Ringwald relocated in the early ’90s, her fluency led to roles in French films like Tous Les Jours Dimanche and Enfants de Salaud.
She also continued to film TV projects in the U.S., like Stephen King’s 1994 miniseries The Stand and Something to Live for: The Alison Gertz Story, and eventually moved back to the States in 1997 to do theater in New York, which kicked off with a starring role in Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, How I Learned to Drive.
Despite the long and varied road of her career, Ringwald has rarely been able to shake off the films and characters that anointed her as a young starlet so many years ago — and she’s entirely okay with that. After reflecting upon her seminal teen films through a #MeToo lens as a mom while watching them with her eldest daughter, Mathilda, Ringwald wrote a candid, thoughtful essay for The New Yorker about what it was like to have to advocate to John Hughes against gratuitous female exploitation and sexism, as well as trying to digest other films through the “porny ... mist” typical of the time.
“John’s movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel,” Ringwald wrote about reliving moments of cringe with her Gen Z witness, “and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teenagers experience. Whether that’s enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say — even criticizing them makes me feel like I’m divesting a generation of some of its fondest memories, or being ungrateful since they helped to establish my career. And yet embracing them entirely feels hypocritical. And yet, and yet. …
Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club.
Universal
“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art — change is essential, but so too is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.”
This sentiment perhaps articulates how some Gen Xers find themselves struggling to reconcile the level of misogyny they’ve always put up with and perhaps even unwittingly participated in, as well as their thoughts about how it could be more to their Gen Z kids’ advantage to learn from the past rather than erase it.
“As I say in the piece, it’s important to know where we’ve come from so we can know where we’re going,” Ringwald says. “I feel very strongly that it doesn’t make any sense to just cancel things and pretend like they didn’t exist. I also feel like the films that I’ve done with John Hughes still have a lot of value. Breakfast Club really takes kids seriously and takes their voices seriously, and that’s something that I really want to encourage with my kids and with the kids of the coming generations. Of course, it’s very emotional to me because I lived through it. I don’t know if I’m ever able to have complete distance from the film nor can my kids. I mean, they’re always going to be looking at their mom in these situations. Certainly, enough people have talked to them about it — I mean, all of their friends have already seen the movies. So, it’s a little bit more complicated, but I do think that it’s a springboard to talk about important issues, and I think that’s really what matters.”
While carefully considering her past, Ringwald is still keeping an eye toward the future. Next up, Ringwald appears in a new limited-edition Netflix series, which, at time of this article’s publication, had to remain nameless. She’s also been working on a screenplay of her own — an organic amalgamation of her writing and acting talents. Not that she always finds the process easy. “Writing is never easy! I’m very suspicious of anybody who says it is,” she says. “I think writing is always a little bit torturous, but, you know, it’s something that you either have to do or you don’t, and, unfortunately, or fortunately, I’m one of those people that has to write.” She says she’s found the change in format from novel to screenplay enjoyable. “It’s different than writing an essay or writing a book. I’ve certainly been around the film business long enough to know what the format is, so I’m liking it.”
As for continuing to maintain the title of “teen Buddha,” Ringwald posits, “I often say it as a joke, but, on the other hand, I feel that it’s pretty unique. There are not that many people that both parents want to listen to, but then also their kids want to listen to. Except for my own, of course! Every teenager that’s not related to me really takes what I say pretty seriously, so I’m really happy that I have that platform, and that I’m in that position, and that I have the authenticity and the ear of both teenagers and their parents. And who knows? Maybe their grandparents too.”
For more information about meningitis and the MenACWY and MenB vaccines, visit the16vaccine.org.