Molly Ringwald‘s career could have gone in a wildly different direction during the late 1980s and early 1990s. She was rejected for Working Girl and The Silence of the Lambs but had the chance to star in Pretty Woman. The Breakfast Club star turned down the lead role that helped make Julia Roberts one of the biggest stars in the world in 1991.
Ringwald, 55, had a very simple reason for rejecting the movie. “Julia Roberts was wonderful in it, but I didn’t really like the story,” Ringwald told The Guardian last week. “Even then, I felt like there was something icky about it.”
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Pretty Woman stars Roberts as Los Angeles sex worker Vivian Ward who is picked up by Richard Gere’s corporate raider Edward Lewis. The next day, Edward offers Vivian $3,000 to pose as his girlfriend for a week. During that time, the two begin falling in love. Roberts earned an Oscar nomination for her performance. The movie was directed by Garry Marshall from a script by J.F. Lawton.
This was not the first time Ringwald mentioned passing on Pretty Woman. In a Reddit AMA session in 2012, Ringwald said she passed on the project when it was still titled 3,000. “The script was okay but I gotta say, Julia Roberts is what makes that movie. It was her part,” Ringwald wrote at the time. “Every actor hopes for a part that lets them shine like that.”
Elsewhere in her new interview, Ringwald reflected on how her roles in The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty In Pink turned her into the image of ideal girlhood. “It’s hard to grow up under that. I don’t want to overdo this – and boohoo, I fully recognize my privilege – but I needed to get out from under all that scrutiny,” she told The Guardian. “I just wasn’t cut out for it in a way that certain other people are. Some people are really good at it. Taylor Swift is amazing! But I didn’t feel comfortable with that level of stardom.”
It also made it difficult for her to get the darker roles she wanted. She recalled how Working Girl director Mike Nichols rejected her. “She really needs to be at that moment where you feel the pain,” Nichols told her. “You have your whole life ahead of you – nobody’s going to believe that of you.”
Although Ringwald still acts and was recently seen in an episode of Single Drunk Female, she now has a unique profession – translating French books into English. Her latest project is Vanessa Schneider’s My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir, which centers on the late Last Tango in Paris actress. Ringwald is fluent in French, attended theLycée Français de Los Angeles, and lived in Paris during the 1990s. Ringwald is also working on her own memoir and plans to direct a film that is in the very early stages.
“When I was younger, I really did have that hangup: who’s going to accept me as a writer? Now, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about the way that somebody is going to see me,” Ringwald told The Guardian. “If you really think about that, you won’t do anything.”
