It’s the 40th Anniversary of the release of the teen cult classic Sixteen Candles, but former actor Michael Schoeffling, who played high school heartthrob Jake Ryan in the 1984 film, won’t be making any anniversary appearances.
After making a few more movies, Schoeffling retired from the spotlight in the early ’90s to live in a small town in Pennsylvania and turned his attention to woodworking.
Now 63 years old, no one knows why he quit acting and he’s never spoken about it, truly preferring a life away from show business with his wife and two kids.
However, his grown daughter Scarlett is now making waves on her own in the modeling world, and is also dabbling in acting.
In 2020, she appeared in Blackjack: The Jackie Ryan Storyand made a guest appearance in the series Billions.
She’s also a model represented by New York Models and LA Models, and has appeared in campaigns for Tommy Bahama.
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The rising Brooklyn-based star is private about her family life, but in 2023, she posted a throwback photo of her dad on the cover of GQ in the ’80s, writing, “my fathers day post is dads first GQ cover. slay.”
Scarlett, who also has a brother, comes from a line of stunning people: her father was a model first and then of course an actor, starring not only in Sixteen Candles but also Vision Quest and Mermaids. Her mother is former actress and model Valerie Robinson.
Robinson and Schoeffling first met on the modeling circuit in New York in the early ’80s, and have been married since 1987. Schoeffling, who was raised in New Jersey, went to Temple University before going to New York to model.
He was discovered by photographer Bruce Weber, who then reportedly convinced him to attend acting school.
In 1983, director John Hughes, who was making his directorial debut with his teen rom-com Sixteen Candleshandpicked Schoeffling, who was actually 23 at the time, to play the role of the hunky high school senior Jake Ryan, who Molly Ringwald’s character Samantha had a massive crush on.
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But Jake Ryan was already dating the beautiful Caroline, played by Haviland Morris. As fate would have it, in the end Samantha got her man.
The comedy was a success, earning $23 million at the box office after being made for a budget of $6 million, but it’s legacy as a cult favorite has far surpassed it’s box office earnings. It also starred Anthony Michael Hall as “the Geek,” Gedde Watanabe as Long Duck Dong, and John Cusack also played a small role.
“I wanted to make a movie about what it was truly like to be 16,” Hughes once said in an interview about the making of Sixteen Candles. “It was never really a comedy or a drama…it had to have a mix of both.” He added, “It made light of a lot of serious subjects.”
