Top 10 Actor-Director Pairings
Molly Ringwald and John Hughes
For all the hundreds of movies angled to teens, adolescents rarely find films that shed a little light on their lives. Hughes, at his peak in the mid-'80s, showed them that light, with a rose-tinted glow. He was the rare writer (and sometimes director) whose pictures weren't about teenagers but inside them. The face of his Molly trilogy — Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink — was an actual teen, lovely enough to be a movie star but with all the ordinary yearnings of her age.
Together, they mined the emotional convulsions that make every kid feel he or she is the first lonely explorer on the dark side of the moon. The mating of a teen star and the creator of teen movies will naturally be short; Hughes and Ringwald made just those three films. But for a few years, they provided a gentle form of psychotherapy, with Hughes as the sympathetic shrink and Ringwald the secretary who makes sure the patient is smiling on the way out.