When Fame Fades

It's a fact of life - every actor who makes it big as a teen someday has to grow up. And the coming of age can sometimes be painful.

Molly Ringwald, the beautiful redhead with the bee-stung lips, and Jon Cryer, an unforgettable geek named "Duckie," struck gold in 1986 with "Pretty in Pink." Ever since, they've had to deal with the question of how to top that.

"I mean, I still get asked to do something with '16 Candles' and the 'Breakfast Club' a couple of times a week," Ringwald tells 48 Hours anchor Lesley Stahl, referring to two of her other early movies.

And people still call Cryer "Duckie."

"I will never say that doing Duckie hurt my career, 'cause when you do something that the public really latches onto, that's the greatest gift an actor can ever have," Cryer tells Stahl. But he admits it led to a lot of other "geek" roles.

Unlike many of their peers, especially those known as part of the "Brat Pack," almost all of whom battled addictions, Ringwald and Cryer managed to avoid the excesses of early successes.

"People are held responsible for things that they have no control over," Cryer says, trying to explain what leads some stars to excess. "You think, 'This movie didn't do well 'cause I'm just not good enough.' You punish yourself."

Ringwald says she came to a point in her career where she really didn't want to act anymore.

"I needed to go somewhere where I wasn't the girl from those movies," she says.

She fled to France for four years and even stopped acting in English. She says her close relationship with her parents helped her keep things in perspective.

Her father was a blind musician and when she was growing up, Ringwald would read to him.

"I read the 'Breakfast Club.' The first time I read it aloud, it was to my dad. I liked it 'cause I could play all the characters."

Her mother, meanwhile, didn't want her to do any nude scenes, which meant she had to turn down a few roles.

No one was begging Jon Cryer for nude scenes.

"Yes, I've played a lot of geeks in my time," he jokes.

"Pretty in Pink" was followed by a slew of disappointing projects and the indignity of constantly being mistaken for Matthew Broderick.

"The very first theater job I had was as an usher in a theater on the Upper West Side," he recalls, "and people would come up to me and tell me how wonderful I was in 'Torch Song Trilogy' (starring Matthew Broderick), which was running downtown. And I said, 'Folks, you think that I hand you your program and then go downtown and do my show? No it doesn't work that way.'"

Not long after that, his career skyrocketed with "Pretty In Pink," and Cryer admits the success went to his head.

"At the time I had these incredible opportunities," he says, "and I decided I wanted to produce. I wanted to help write. I wanted to do all these things, and I didn't know how to do any of those things.

"I chose to believe in myself - and that's the biggest mistake I ever made."

Cryer credits his inner workaholic for keeping his from falling into Brat Pack behaviors. In the years that followed, he constantly pursued television, starring in four failed sitcoms.

"You know, the term 'show killer' has been bandied about a few times," he jokes.

But no one is calling him "show killer" anymore. He's starring in the CBS hit "Two and Half Men" with Charlie Sheen. And guess what? He's the geek.

He refuses to discus his private life, and asks that no family pictures be shown. He's getting a divorce and has a 4-year-old son.

"I love being a daddy," he says. "It makes you care about something else. It's like show business in that you have the illusion of control over your child, but you don't actually have any. So in a way it's a wonderful metaphor for show business."

Ringwald came back from Paris in 2000. Now she and her 6-month-old daughter, Mathilda, live in New York with the baby's father, Panio Gianopoulos.

Though she is no longer a superstar, she has never stopped working on television and on Broadway. She's even been a book reviewer for The Hartford Courant.

"I'm sort of loathe to give advice," she tells Stahl, "but if I could, it would be to make sure you find something outside of the business that excites you, that inspires you. Something that you have that's just your own, that's separate."

Cryer has different advice: "If you love what you're doing, it won't matter how many people love you for it."