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Life Imitates Art! Molly Ringwald’s Mother Forgot Her Birthday — Just Like in ‘Sixteen Candles’

Molly Ringwald’s Mother Forgets Her Birthday — Just Like ‘Sixteen Candles’
Molly Ringwald. Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock

They forgot her f–king birthday! Molly Ringwald lived out a scene from Sixteen Candles when her mother forgot her birthday.

Related: ‘Sixteen Candles’ Cast: Where Are They Now?

“Actual conversation with my mom today,” the Breakfast Club star, 58, wrote on Instagram alongside a screenshot of a chat with her mother that took place on Friday, February 18. In the texts, Ringwald asked if her parents had “anything else to say to me today,” around 4 p.m.

“I didn’t realize it was the 18th today!” the Secret Life of the American Teenager alum’s mother responded, adding “Happy Birthday!” Ringwald was quick to point out the similarities between the situation and one of her most iconic films, writing that “Life imitates art.”

Her mother agreed: “How true. [Although] it took me a few more years to forget.”

In the film, Ringwald plays Sam, a 16-year-old whose parents forget about her birthday amid the stresses of her older sister Ginny’s wedding. The teenager ends up going on an adventure to forget about her failed birthday only to discover that her crush, Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), has finally noticed her. The film also starred Blanche Baker as Ginny, Gedde Watanabe as foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong, Anthony Michael Hall as the geeky Ted and brother and sister duo Joan Cusack and John Cusack in minor roles.

Related: ‘80s Stars: Where Are They Now?

Sixteen Candles was Ringwald’s breakthrough role and her first collaboration with writer and director John Hughes.

Molly Ringwald’s Mother Forgets Her Birthday — Just Like ‘Sixteen Candles’
Molly Ringwald and Michael Schoeffling in ‘Sixteen Candles’. Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock

“It can be hard to remember how scarce art for and about teen-agers was before John Hughes arrived,” the Riverdale star wrote in an April 2018 essay for The New Yorker about the films she made with the late director. “The Breakfast Club was to be his directorial debut; he planned to shoot it in Chicago with local actors. He told me later that, over a July 4th weekend, while looking at headshots of actors to consider for the movie, he found mine, and decided to write another movie around the character he imagined that girl to be. That script became Sixteen Candles, a story about a girl whose family forgets her sixteenth birthday.”

She continued: “No one in Hollywood was writing about the minutiae of high school, and certainly not from a female point of view.” (Hughes died in 2009 at the age of 59, after suffering a sudden heart attack.)

Though she has a lot of affection for Sixteen Candles and the other films she made with Hughes, Ringwald confessed in a March 2021 interview with Vogue that she has “complicated” feelings about them as an adult.

“I recognize that those films are so meaningful for generations of people. I feel very protective of them, but at the same time I also have complicated feelings toward them,” the Jem and the Holograms actress said at the time.

Related: Stars Who Have Taken Acting Roles They Later Regret

“I definitely feel like they’re flawed, and there are things I don’t like about them — the lack of diversity in particular always bothers me,” she continued, adding that she feels that Pretty in Pink is the “least problematic” of the three collaborations. “But I would say overall,” added Ringwald, “that I feel very loving and nostalgic towards the films I made with John. They occupy an important part of my life.”

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