Robert Downey Jr almost starred in the John Hughes classic ‘Pretty in Pink’
If there was one man who dominated 1980s teen comedies, of which there were thousands, it was undoubtedly John Hughes, the man who displayed an almost uncanny ability to capture the world of bedroom posters, frizzy hair, ghetto blasters and awkward fumbling and send it to the big screen to audiences who lapped it up.
But the director, who died cruelly young at 59 back in 2009, didn’t just do escapist teenager fare, displaying an unrivalled gift for understanding the zeitgeist of the decade while living in it, but also comedy in general, resulting in not just a brilliantly enjoyable film in John Candy’s Uncle Buck, but also in one of the greatest road trip movies of all time in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
In the years leading up to that Steve Martin classic, however, Hughes produced a run of films that deserved a genre of their own, taking the brightest young actors and handing them razor-sharp, dismissively cool scripts and setting them in everyday, relatable worlds that teens, especially in American high schools, couldn’t get enough of.
Starting off with Sixteen Candles, Hughes wrote and directed a string of movies that have lasted the test of time and still give an authentic window into what it was like to be a teenager in the United States in the mid-1980s. He quickly followed it up with slacker classic The Breakfast Club, then geek fantasy Weird Science and the bunking off school movie to end them all, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986. All of them were hugely successful.
The same year, Hughes cast The Breakfast Club’s Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, a romantic comedy again set in and out of high schools that co-starred Alien’s Harry Dean Stanton and James Spader, which told the story of Ringwald’s Andie Walsh and her relationships with three pivotal men in her life. With a soundtrack full of super new wave songs and such acting talent on display, it became a global hit, making five times its budget on release.
Ringwald’s performance was unanimously acclaimed, as was future Two and a Half Men star Jon Cryer in his role as ‘Duckie’, Ringwald’s love interest. He very nearly lost out on the part, however, with Ringwald lobbying for the up-and-coming Robert Downey Jr instead, who had appeared in Hughes’s Weird Science.
She told British Vogue: “I had wanted Robert for the role. I think John (Hughes) wanted either Anthony [Michael Hall] or Michael J Fox, who was gonna do it at one point but had to drop out because he got Back to the Future.
“It would’ve made for a completely different movie had any of them played Duckie. But once Jon [Cryer] stepped into that role, there was no question that he was the guy. He put so much of himself into that role that it’s impossible to imagine anybody else.”
In the end, Ringwald didn’t have to wait long to get her wish of co-starring with Downey Jr, as the pair of them took the leads in 1987’s The Pick-up Artist, directed by Bugsy’s James Toback. It didn’t have the magic of Hughes’ movies, however, and attracted criticism due to the promiscuity of the characters in a time when AIDS was very much at the forefront of people’s minds.
After another couple of teen movies, Ringwald’s movie career fell away to some degree, and she spent much of the 1990s acting sporadically in TV miniseries, including Stephen King’s The Stand.
