Stripper addiction, sex tape & star who got lover pregnant on eve of wedding to A-list icon… wild lives of the Brat Pack
THEY were the hottest actors in Hollywood and everyone wanted to be in the Brat Pack – except those who were actually in it.
The group, which includes Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe, dominated the silver screen back in the 80s.
Now, nearly 40 years on, the Brat Pack are reuniting for the first time for a new documentary, Brats, looking back at the phenomenon they were all a part of.
The eight young actors starred alongside each other in several hit coming-of-age films during the 80s, catapulting them to stardom and appeared on the front cover of New York magazine in 1985.
They were given their nickname – a playful nod to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack – by journalist David Blum who described them as entitled and bratty in the article.
The moniker stuck – and would have a lasting effect on the careers and lives of its members.
The film, which has just come out in America and is available to stream on Disney+ from July 5, is produced and directed by Brat Pack star Andrew McCarthy.
It sees the actor tracking down his fellow members and persuading them to speak on camera.
He says in the trailer: “I’ve never talked to anybody about what that was like so I thought it might be interesting to contact everyone who was in the Brat Pack.”
Ahead of its release, we reveal what happened to the Brat Pack…
Andrew McCarthy, 61
The actor starred in St Elmo’s Fire in 1985, before going on to play cool guy Blane in the 1986 film, Pretty In Pink.
Co-star Jon Cryer, who played love rival, Ducky, says of Andrew in the documentary: “We did not get along because he was a d**k”.
And Andrew candidly admits: “That’s very true.”
Behind the scenes, he suffered from a secret battle with drink and drugs and his cocaine habit was so bad he nearly had a heart attack.
Recalling his party days in his 2021 memoir Brat: An ’80s Story he wrote how he nearly threw up in Liza Minnelli‘s Rolls-Royce and once tried to chat up Friends star Courteney Cox, but she “was having none of me”.
He also became a regular at Sunset Boulevard strip club the Body Shoppe and had a short-lived affair with a stripper called Glitter.
In 1992, Andrew went to rehab and he’s been sober ever since.
The actor is also an award-winning travel writer, as well as a director, and has worked on a number of TV shows, including Netflix‘s Orange Is The New Black.
Andrew’s son Sam, 22, is also an actor who has starred in the Netflix show Dead To Me, with his first wife Carol Schneider.
He tied the knot with Irish writer and director Dolores Rice in 2011.
They have two children, Rowan and Willow, 18 – who has played the lead in Matilda on Broadway.
Estimated worth: £9.4million
Molly Ringwald, 56
Molly shot to fame in the John Hughes classic Sixteen Candles, revealing in 2018 that the American film director wrote the script for the 1984 film in one weekend after seeing a photo of the then 15-year-old in her agent’s office.
She went on to star in his other films, Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club.
But he reportedly cut her off after she declined the role he had created for her in 1987’s Some Kind Of Wonderful because she wanted to do other projects.
Molly later mysteriously abandoned her successful Hollywood career and moved to France.
Decades later the actress revealed why, in an article in the New Yorker entitled “All the Other Harvey Weinsteins” published amid the #MeToo scandal in 2017.
In it, she claimed she had been sexually harassed several times throughout her career.
Molly wrote: “I have had plenty of Harveys of my own over the years, enough to feel a sickening shock of recognition.
“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.”
But she made a triumphant return to the spotlight that year when she starred in the second series of the hit drama Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.
She also appeared in the 2022 TV drama, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
Molly, has three children, Mathilda, 20, and twins Adele and Roman, 14, with husband, author Panio Gianopoulos, 48, who she married in 2007.
Molly declined to take part in the new documentary which features clips of her in her 80s heyday.
Rob Lowe, 60
The heartthrob was 21 when he starred in St Elmo’s Fire alongside Demi and Emilio and has admitted he turned to drink to cope with his fame.
Then, in 1988, he was involved in a sex tape scandal with a 16-year-old girl who he met at a nightclub in Georgia in the US.
While the age of consent in the American state is 16, the girl was not legally allowed to be recorded.
Rob, who maintained he did not know she was 16, later settled a lawsuit with the girl’s family but was not charged with a crime.
The tape led him to quit drinking.
Speaking last year, he said: “I think it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.
“Honestly, I do, because it got me sober. Sober got me married.
“I’ve been married 29 years and I have two great sons, so I don’t think any of that happens without going through that scandal.”
However, the fallout from the tape did hurt his public image, with him admitting in 2015 he missed out on a big role.
He said: I lost the role in Titanic that Billy Zane got.”
Rob has been married to makeup artist Sheryl Berkoff, 62, since 1991.
They have two sons, Matthew, 30, and John Owen, 28, who played his dad’s on-screen son in the 2023 Netflix comedy Unstable.
He has continued to act and now has his own podcast called Literally, with celebrity guests including Oprah Winfrey, Chris Pratt and fellow Brat Pack star Demi.
Speaking in the documentary, he says: “Being in The Brat Pack not only changed all of our lives, it changed what entertainment is.
“I’m not going to say we were The Beatles or anything, but…”
Estimated worth: £78.6million
Emilio Estevez, 62
Emilio, who is the son of actor Martin Sheen – real name Ramón Estévezand – and the older brother of actor Charlie Sheen, has been credited as the leader of the Brat Pack.
The actor chose not to take his father’s stage name, saying in 1983: “I didn’t want to ride into the business as Martin Sheen’s son.”
He starred in Repo Man, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire back-to-back and achieved the career longevity that seems to have escaped some of his fellow Brat Packers.
In 1992, Emilio starred as the coach in The Mighty Ducks about an ice hockey team, reprising his role in the 2021 Disney+ series, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers.
He had a high profile engagement to his St Elmo’s Fire co-star Demi but she called off their December 1986 wedding after discovering he had cheated on her with model Carey Salley and got her pregnant.
Demi said earlier this year: “Emilio and I had in fact just mailed out the invitations for our wedding when a friend told me she had seen him out with someone else in LA.
“During a two-week breakup a few months before, he’d slept with an ‘ex’ girlfriend, lied about it, and then been forced to tell me the truth when he found out she was pregnant.”
Estevez has two children with Carey Salley who, in 1987, filed a $2 million paternity suit against him before he acknowledged their paternity.
He then married singer-choreographer Paula Abdul from 1992 until 1994 with her saying it ended because she wanted kids and he didn’t want any more.
After his divorce, Emilio, now believed to be single, moved into directing, casting ex-girlfriend Demi in a leading role in his 2006 film Bobby about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
The pair played a couple locked in a toxic marriage but Emilio said: “It was no reflection on what our relationship was like when we were engaged.
“She and I had been friends for years.”
He says in the documentary the Brat Pack members were“kryptonite” to each other’s careers and the negative press put him off working on other movies with them.
Emilio explains: “Working together just almost felt like we were kryptonite to each other.”
Estimated worth: £14million
Demi Moore, 62
Demi secured her place in the Brat Pack with roles in 1984’s Blame It on Rio, St. Elmo’s Fire the following year and About Last Night in 1986.
The documentary explores her drug and alcohol abuse, which began in her 20s as she tried to cope with her ever-increasing stardom.
St Elmo’s Fire director Joel Schumacher threatened the young star to clean up her act or she would be fired from the production.
He said in 1997: “I didn’t want to do what they had done with John Belushi, which was just to give her the money to kill herself.”
Demi, who was sent to rehab before filming started, recalls in the documentary: “They paid to have a companion, a sober companion with me 24/7 during the whole shooting.
“They could have easily just found someone else.”
She went on to have huge Hollywood success.
By the mid-1990s, she was the highest-paid actress, with hits including Ghost, A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Striptease.
Demi was married to the now-late musician Freddy Moore for five years before tying the knot with fellow Hollywood actor Bruce Willis in 1987.
They have three daughters, Rumer, 35, Scout, 32, and Tallulah, 30.
The actress split with Bruce, 69, in 2000 before marrying third husband Ashton Kutcher five years later.
In her 2019 memoir, she revealed she almost died after she had a seizure from inhaling Nitrous oxide and smoking synthetic marijuana at a party after suffering a relapse before seeking treatment for a second time.
I didn’t want to do what they had done with John Belushi, which was just to give her the money to kill herself
Joel Schumacher on Demi
Demi still has a successful film career today but has admitted she has always hated the Brat Pack moniker.
She said: “It really irritated me.
“None of us really liked the idea of being called ‘brats’ or that we weren’t professionals or didn’t take our work seriously.”
Estimated worth: £157million
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Judd Nelson, 64
Judd starred in The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire – and was the original bad boy, with every teenage girl in the 80s lusting over him.
He is still acting and has appeared on some popular TV series in recent years, including Two And A Half Men, CSI, Psych, Suddenly Susan and Empire.
Speaking about the now infamous New York Magazine article, he has said: “It was a bad thing that happened as a result of this.
“After that article, not only are we strongly encouraged not to work with each other again — and for the most part we haven’t – but it was insinuated we might not want to be hanging out with these people.
“And it was like, I didn’t know that good friends are so easy to come by in this world that they should be tossed asunder.”
And he added: “It just seemed like we were like fruit picked too soon, and then blamed for being picked too soon.
These days he likes to keep a low profile and doesn’t use social media, saying in 2021: “I’m not interested in seeing photographs of what somebody is eating for dinner. I’m just not.
“I mean that’s great that they like their dinner, but I’m not going to post pictures of what I’m eating!”
The actor has said he “politely declined” the request to take part in the documentary, saying: “I don’t even know who’s in the Brat Pack.
“It’s like, why kind of rebirth something that wasn’t necessarily fun?”
Estimated worth: £3.1million
Ally Sheedy, 61
Ally played black-clad misfit Allison Reynolds – dubbed the “Basket Case” – in The Breakfast Club and has since admitted her character’s makeover made her feel “uncomfortable.”
Speaking in 2022, she said: “It was uncomfortable even when we were filming it.
“It was one of those things, though. It was the 80s and we got to take this young woman who seems like a crazy person and make her into, you know, somebody pretty or whatever it was.”
She added, “But I agree Allison is much more delicious before the hair bow goes on.”
In 1991, the actress published a book of poetry that detailed her battle with addiction, an eating disorder and depression.
Speaking at the time of its release, she said: “When I came to Hollywood in 1980, I was compulsive and smoking a lot of pot. I went to see a counsellor and got sober for seven years.
“Then I fell in love with somebody who is a heavy drinker, and it started all over again. I would take tranquillisers… they were my means of escape.”
With the help of fellow actress Demi, she went into rehab and recovered.
She has claimed she was encouraged to get a boob job to get more roles because producers told her she wasn’t “f**kable”, and that she had managers who pushed for her to get implants.
The actress said in 2020: “As time went on, the white men’s club in Hollywood became more and more uncomfortable.
“I preferred to work with women but I didn’t have that many opportunities to do so. Hollywood was and is a misogynist culture.
“There was quite a bit of pressure on me from the men in power about what I looked like, and about this and that and the other thing.
“Acting started to just feel more and more to me like something that I didn’t want my life to necessarily be about.”
Ally has a son Beckett, 30, with her ex-husband, actor David Lansbury, 63, the nephew of actress Angela Lansbury,
She is still acting but also teaches in the theatre department at City College of New York.
She has admitted she hated the Brat Pack nickname, saying: “I truly felt a part of something, and that guy just blew it to pieces.”
Estimated worth: £3.1million
Anthony Michael Hall, 56
Anthony Michael Hall was just 16 when he played Brian Johson in The Breakfast Club, although he had been acting since the age of eight.
The actor went on to work for Saturday Night Live, and also took on roles in Edward Scissorhands in 1990 and the 2021 film Halloween Kills.
Anthony, who is set to star in the upcoming Netflix thriller, Trigger Warning, has previously revealed he started drinking aged just 13, and by the age of 18 booze played a large role in his life.
But he gave up alcohol in his early 20s and is said to have been sober ever since.
However, the star made headlines back in 2016 when he was charged with assaulting his neighbour by shoving him, causing him to fall and break his wrist.
He was later sentenced to 40 hours of community service and three years of informal probation.
Last year, he became a dad for the first time at the age of 55 after his wife, actress Lucia Oskerova, 33, gave birth to their son, Michael Anthony Hall II.
Speaking about the Brat Pack in 2021, he said: “It didn’t exist. It was a media ploy.
“Whoever was the editor of New York Magazine at the time, it was a set up.
“‘Let’s get all these guys together and get them talking sh*t.’
“The truth is in that time frame, I was at the very young end of that group. I was literally still in high school.
“When we did The Breakfast Club, Emilio and Judd were in their early 20s and they are going out and having beers and I was a teen.
“So when they did that article I did feel that was a ploy to get all them yapping.”
Estimated worth: £3.1million
Mare Winningham
Although not seen as an ‘official’ member of the Brat Pack, Mare starred in St Elmo’s Fire, and featured on the cover of the 1985 New York magazine, before going on to star in the Tom Hanks smash Turner & Hooch and the 1994 Western Wyatt Earp.
In 1996 she gained an Oscar nomination for her role in Georgia and she also has two Emmys, for the miniseries Amber Waves and George Wallace.
Now 65, Mare has been married four times and has five children with her second husband, TV technician William Mapel. Tragically her oldest son, Riley, took his own life at the age of 24, in 2005.
She first met current husband, actor Anthony Edwards, when they starred together in The Miracle Mile in 1988. They remained close for decades before finally becoming romantically involved and eloping in 2021.
Estimated worth: £2million
Brats is available to stream in the UK on Disney+ from July 5