The acting advice Molly Ringwald took from Gena Rowlands: “I never forgot”
Most people know Molly Ringwald as the red-headed teen in the John Hughes movies Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. She was an ‘It Girl’ of the late 1980s, a glamorous movie star who could play the girl next door. But before she became a star, she was a child actor looking for her big break in Hollywood.
Ringwald spent several years auditioning unsuccessfully for roles until she finally landed her first film. Most actors have humble feature debuts that they’d just as soon forget, but Ringwald’s first movie was the opposite. 1982’s Tempest was directed by Paul Mizursky, the five-time Oscar nominee who made Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman, and A Love Story. The cast was even more impressive. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands starred as a married couple who separate when he discovers her infidelity, and Susan Sarandon played the woman he begins an affair with during a trip to Greece. Ringwald, who was 13 at the time, played the couple’s daughter.
Filmed in Greece and at Cinecittà in Rome, Tempest was a formative experience for the young actor, who had been considering giving up acting and becoming a dancer or singer instead. She compared making the film to being at summer camp and fondly remembered Federico Fellini visiting the set one day and patting her on the head.
Still, the experience was not without its challenges. Any first-time movie actor would struggle to get their bearings on set, but for a 13-year-old in Europe trying to hold her own against one of the most iconoclastic creative duos in cinema history, it was a much tougher challenge. Cassavetes and Rowlands had made their greatest movies together. With him as director and her as a star, they helped shape independent cinema. Movies like A Woman Under the Influence, Faces, and Opening Night gave Rowlands the opportunity to showcase her raw, naturalistic style of acting and influence generations of performers.
The couple’s working style was famously intense, featuring lengthy rehearsals and lots of improvisation. Although Cassavetes wasn’t directing Tempest, their collaborative synergy was deeply ingrained, and when Ringwald found herself in the middle of a scene with them, she was thrown into the deep end. It was an emotional section of the film in which Cassavetes’s character confronts his wife over her infidelity and breaks up their marriage.
“I had memorised all my lines, I think, before the first day of work,” Ringwald remembered in an interview with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast. “I had memorised the entire script, and I was super prepared. And then this scene is happening, and all of a sudden, the lines are different, and John’s just like, going off and talking… And I just panicked.”
She muddled through the scene, but as soon as Mizursky called “cut,” she ran downstairs to where her dad was, climbed into his lap, and burst into tears. “I was convinced I was going to be fired,” she said. But Rowlands came to the rescue. Even though Ringwald was intimidated by her and found Cassavetes to be much easier to get along with, she found that the actor had the right thing to say just when she needed to hear it most.
“Just so you know,” Rowlands told her, “John will say everything that’s not in the script. That’s what he does. But he’ll always give your lead-in line. He’ll always give you that line. And when you hear it, you have to jump in.” And that, Ringwald said, was how she learned what improv was. “I never forgot.”
Tempest changed her life. She left Europe knowing for certain that acting was what she wanted to do. The only trouble, she revealed, was that it set her expectations too high, and no film ever matched it.
