When Molly Ringwald was first approached to translate My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider, she said no. It’s not that she wasn’t interested in the late French actor, whose life was so horribly defined and dominated by Last Tango in Paris. Nor was it that she felt too close to the industry to tackle the life story of such a tragic figure. “The opposite,” she says, speaking to me from Vancouver, where she is filming the supernatural drama series Riverdale. “I felt my experience as an actor would only bring more to the project. Because I feel like I understood her.” It was just that she originally didn’t have time. Then the pandemic hit.
At the start of our video call, her camera isn’t working. It doesn’t matter, I say: just tell me what you look like. “I don’t want to do that,” she says, drily. Then her face appears: as camera-ready and photogenic at 55 as it was in the mid-80s when her career took off, but also relaxed, thoughtful, bespectacled. She looks like a film star playing an academic who was in the middle of reading something more interesting, but is patient enough to break off to talk to me for a bit.
She takes up Schneider’s story, the making of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film and its infamous rape scene. “She was on board for a lot of it. I feel like she personified the time [the film was released in 1972]: she was free, she was bisexual, she was really happy to be part of something that was daring. They just went the extra step that they didn’t need to go. The film could have been daring and provocative without that. She should have been able to consent.”
Schneider was 19 when they shot the film. Bertolucci didn’t tell her the plot until just before filming: that Marlon Brando’s character was going to anally rape hers. “Even though there was no actual penetration, he set up a rape, because she didn’t consent to that,” she says. “And he said: ‘That was what I wanted. I wanted the reaction of a girl, not of an actress.’ And that’s not right.”
Bertolucci’s casual denigration of Schneider – she couldn’t possibly act humiliated; he had to make sure that she was humiliated – makes it hard to take seriously any of the penitence he expressed in later years. “I think he knew he had to atone, to say something,” says Ringwald. “So he did, but if you see his different interviews, his story changes. I feel like he said what he felt he was supposed to say.”
The crowning injustice is not that Bertolucci and Brando made a fortune from the film, and Schneider very little, but that she ended up as the punchline of the piece, all the innuendo loaded on her. It eclipsed the rest of her career, in a way that it didn’t anyone else’s. “I feel like I knew Maria Schneider originally just by ‘butter’ [which Brando’s character uses as a lubricant],” she says. “As a teenager, when I thought about that film, that’s all I thought about. I didn’t know anything about her other work, or her as a person.”
Years after Last Tango, Ringwald met Bertolucci when she was attached to The Queen’s Gambit and he was lined up to direct it (the co-creator of the Netflix series, Allan Scott, originally wanted to make it as a film). Translating this work has made her relieved afresh that the movie never came off. Yet having been in showbiz since 1978 – she had her first stage role when she was 10, having already recorded a Dixieland jazz album with her father, a jazz pianist – Ringwald has had her own brushes with “the other Weinsteins”.
She wrote about this in the New Yorker in 2017, at the start of the #MeToo movement. “When I was 13, a 50-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection. When I was 14, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set.” Once, she complained to her agent about an audition in which she was forced to wear a dog collar; he laughed and told her to save it for her memoirs.
Today, she describes it in broad terms as “a different time. There were certain things that were accepted [in the 80s] that just wouldn’t be accepted now.”
Predators in Hollywood trying to get off with 13-year-olds is different from the ambient misogyny of the industry, but not unrelated. “Muse” is an overworked word, freighted with patriarchal cliches (the genius auteur who needs a beautiful, young, quiet woman to trigger his creativity), but John Hughes, whose films Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles revolutionised teen cinema in the mid-80s, was clearly writing his female leads for the teenage Ringwald.
In many ways, these films were original and subversive. On set, Ringwald felt heard. Even her mum was heard, when she objected to bog-standard sexist content. “I did feel protected. I had my parents around and I felt like they were very protective of me.” Yet each film has subplots and moments of misogyny, from subtle to breathtaking.
In Sixteen Candles, for instance, one of the characters trades his drunk girlfriend to his friend, who gets to have sex with her in exchange for a pair of knickers he has stolen off someone else. “The whole storyline with Caroline, that didn’t have anything to do with my character,” she says. “So I really couldn’t change that. I didn’t have that kind of power.”
These films are quite uncomfortable to watch now, especially if you have kids the age of the characters (Ringwald has a daughter of 19 and twins of 13). She can’t even watch The Breakfast Club with her younger daughter. “She’s very liberal. I mean, I’m very liberal, but she’s another level. Which she should be, and I’m glad,” says Ringwald.
“In a way, my experience was the opposite of Maria’s,” she adds, returning to Schneider. “The way she was thought of, this wanton muse, this louche character; that’s what was expected of her. It was the very opposite of me: I was projected as this perfect, sweet American girl next door. Which wasn’t me, but I was figuring out who I was, too. I was pretty young.”
Those films came out at a lick, one a year between 1984 and 1986, and were huge. “There will be some people who will always see me that way, until I do something that’s as big as one of those movies – and it would be pretty hard to top those in terms of box office,” she says.
Even though the values of mainstream cinema evolved and the standards of behaviour changed, Ringwald is cautious about what counts as progress. “It’s like bullying in schools. They say: ‘We have a zero-tolerance policy.’ After that, it still exists, but it goes a little bit underground. It’s a bit harder to get caught. It gets harder to say: ‘Is this bullying or not?’ It’s a bit like that with #MeToo.
“I don’t think a Harvey Weinstein situation could exist now. But, again, a lot of people have gotten swept up in ‘cancellation’, and I worry about that; it’s unsustainable, in a way. Some people have been unfairly cancelled and they don’t belong in the same category as somebody like Harvey Weinstein.”
She continues: “What it ends up doing is make people roll their eyes. That’s my worry. I do want things to change, for real. Workplaces should be places where everyone can feel safe – not just in Hollywood, but everywhere. Particularly Americans. We can never do things incrementally; we’re so binary, so all or nothing. We’re basically a bunch of puritans.”
By the late 80s, Ringwald personified ideal girlhood in the US, which was a heavy burden. “It’s hard to grow up under that. I don’t want to overdo this – and boohoo, I fully recognise my privilege – but I needed to get out from under all that scrutiny,” she says. “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 wasn’t great for her career. “I didn’t really feel like darker roles were available to me. The ones that I wanted to do, I didn’t get. I was too young for certain roles. I was at this weird in-between stage.” Hitting 20 in 1988, she got turned down for Mike Nichols’ comedy Working Girl, about a young woman’s attempts to climb the corporate ladder. “‘She really needs to be at that moment where you feel the pain,’” she remembers the director saying. “‘You have your whole life ahead of you – nobody’s going to believe that of you.’” Likewise The Silence of the Lambs. She rejected Pretty Woman: “Julia Roberts was wonderful in it, but I didn’t really like the story. Even then, I felt like there was something icky about it.”
In a surprise move – made marginally less surprising if you know she went to the Lycée Français de Los Angeles – she moved to Paris and saw out the 90s there. “I don’t think anybody would have thought that an actor could translate,” she says. “As far as I know, I’m the only actor who translates.” I didn’t realise any Americans spoke French, I joke. Fortunately, she realises.
“I really didn’t know exactly what I wanted – I was just following my bliss,” she says, self-mockingly. But it did turn out blissful. She made King Lear with Jean-Luc Godard: “He was mischievous, he was intriguing. He was not the easiest person to work with, but I’m glad that I did. He was a legend – he changed cinema. It was an incredible experience.”
French film sets were much more humane than the US’s, she says. They had a proper lunch break, with wine. When a co-star had a problem with a striptease and walked off set, people worked around it. “In America, an actress leaves the set, it’s a big scandal. They’re sued, maybe. It’s a big thing.”
Back in the US in 2003, after a short marriage that ended the year before, she had her first daughter with the Greek-American writer and editor Panio Gianopoulos, followed by twins in 2009. From 2008 to 2013, she starred in the series The Secret Life of the American Teenager. “I had kids to support,” she says. Even so, she hated being away filming or, worse, on stage every night. “I tried to do things that were interesting to me outside that. That’s when I got really serious about doing music, writing books, writing essays. Eventually, people had to see me as something other than America’s sweetheart.”
In 2013, she made a jazz album, Except Sometimes, and toured it, but that meant being away from her kids. “I always knew that I would probably have to choose between writing and singing. So I decided to focus on the writing, because I could be closer to home.” Her novel, When It Happens to You, was published in 2012; her translation of Philippe Besson’s novel Lie With Me came out in 2019. “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. If you really think about that, you won’t do anything.”
You certainly can’t accuse her of that – she is writing a memoir and moving into directing, attached to a project too nascent to discuss. “When I came up, if you wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, that’s all you could do,” she says. “It’s different for men. Warren Beatty was an actor and director and producer. Robert Redford … It was something that men were allowed to do and women not. How can you be a muse if you’re behind the camera? But I will do it.”
My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir, by Vanessa Schneider, translated by Molly Ringwald, is published by Scribner
