The Real-Life Couples of the Brat Pack: Engagements, Flings and Marriages of Your Favorite ‘80s Stars
You won't believe which two '80s stars were briefly engaged!
The charismatic young actors of the Brat Pack defined the ’80s with their performances in films like The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire, and many a Gen X-er grew up watching them and relating to all romance, drama and humor onscreen.
Decades later, the Brat Pack remains beloved both by those who were around in the ’80s and Millennial and Gen Z audiences, and the youth-oriented movies of the era remain nostalgic favorites. Here’s a look at the personal lives of the Brat Pack members—from Rob Lowe to Molly Ringwald—and who they dated and married.
Emilio Estevez
Emilio Estevez and fellow Brat Pack member Demi Moore got much media attention for their 1985 engagement, but they abruptly called it off.
In her 2019 memoir, Inside Out, Moore spilled the beans on why her engagement to Estevez didn’t work out, writing, “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 L.A. He denied it, of course, but I was having a hard time trusting him: 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.”
After going through this soap opera-level drama and being involved in a paternity suit brought by model Carey Salley, the aforementioned ex, Estevez married singer and dancer Paula Abdul in 1992. They divorced in 1994.
Estevez has two children from his relationship with Salley: Taylor, who followed in his dad’s footsteps and went into the film industry, and Paloma, a drummer.
Demi Moore
Prior to her ill-fated engagement to Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore (née Demi Guynes) married musician Freddy Moore in 1981, when she was 18 and he was 30. They divorced in 1985, and in her memoir, Moore revealed, “The night before we got married, instead of working on my vows, I was calling a guy I’d met on a movie set. I snuck out of my own bachelorette party and went to his apartment.”
In 1983, after Moore and her first husband separated, she began dating fellow actor Timothy Hutton. In 1987, Moore met Bruce Willis at a screening of Stakeout, a movie starring Emilio Estevez, and they married that year. They had three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah, all of whom have gone into creative fields and been in the public eye.
While Moore and Willis divorced in 2000, they remained friendly, and she wrote, “It’s a funny thing to say, but I’m very proud of our divorce. I think Bruce was fearful at the beginning that I was going to make our split difficult, and that I would express my anger and whatever baggage that I had from our marriage by obstructing his access to the kids—that I’d turn to all of those ploys divorcing couples use as weapons. But I didn’t, and neither did he.”
Since Willis’ tragic dementia diagnosis in 2023, Moore has been spending time with him and his current wife and acting as a caretaker.
In 2005, Moore became tabloid fodder when she married That ’70s Show star Ashton Kutcher, who was 15 years her junior. Following their divorce in 2013, Moore dated musician Sean Friday and chef Daniel Humm.
Moore is currently happily single, and said, “Do I date? I don’t know. It’s not really been where my focus is, I’ll say that. Particularly in the past four, five years, my focus has been to lean into my work.”
Rob Lowe
Rob Lowe has been married to makeup artist and jewelry designer Sheryl Berkoff since 1991. The longtime pair met on a blind date in 1983, but didn’t start their relationship until 1989, when they reconnected on the set of Lowe’s thriller Bad Influence.
Lowe and Berkoff have two sons, Matthew and John. John is an actor who stars alongside his dad on the Netflix comedy Unstable, while Matthew is a businessman.
Reflecting on his marriage in an exclusive Woman’s World interview, Lowe said, “I think it’s all about that first choice of who you pick . . . that’s half of it. I married my best friend, and that will always be there when other things ebb and flow. We’re also willing to work when we need to work on our relationship and give each other time and space and love, and not take each other for granted or try to change one another. I’m Sheryl’s biggest fan and I’m still blown away by how her mind works, her energy, her capacity to help people and to give of herself. It’s one of the things I recognized in her from day one.”
Molly Ringwald
In the ’80s, Molly Ringwald dated musicians like Dweezil Zappa, the son of iconoclastic rock legend Frank Zappa, and Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock of the rap group Beastie Boys.
Ringwald married French writer and translator Valéry Lameignère in 1999. The pair divorced in 2002, and she married Greek-American writer Panio Gianopoulos in 2007. They have two daughters, Mathilda and Adele, and a son, Roman.
In addition to her acting career, Ringwald is an accomplished writer and translator, and she and Gianopoulos met through the online literary community. Asked about their shared interests in the intellectual, she said, “I really like writing next to my husband. I feel incredibly comfortable. I love to have him there so I can pat his knee—I find it very comforting,” while on Instagram she shared that he writes her a poem every year.
Andrew McCarthy
Andrew McCarthy married his college sweetheart, actress Carol Schneider, in 1999. They had a son, Sam, who went on to become an actor and appear in the Netflix series Dead to Me. In 2023, McCarthy published a memoir, Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain, about his relationship with his son.
McCarthy and Schneider divorced in 2005, and since 2011, the actor has been married to Dolores Rice, a writer, director and professor. They have a son, Rowan, and a daughter, Willow.
McCarthy met Rice by chance after a screening of a film he wrote and directed, and as soon as he saw her it was love at first sight. As he put it, “It was something odd, like: ‘It’s done now, I’ve met you. You don’t look like I thought you would but it’s OK, we’ve met.”
Judd Nelson
Judd Nelson dated Loree Rodkin, the talent manager who helped launch Brad Pitt’s career, in the ’80s. She later became an acclaimed jewelry designer and created pieces for Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor and Michelle Obama.
Nelson then dated Shannen Doherty, who he met when they costarred in the 1994 erotic thriller Blindfold: Acts of Obsession and called “funny as hell.”
Later in the ’90s, he dated model Kelly Stafford.
Ally Sheedy
Ally Sheedy dated Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora in the ’80s. She was also linked to actors like Alec Baldwin, Woody Harrelson and Eric Stoltz.
In 1992, Sheedy married David Lansbury, the nephew of Murder, She Wrote star Angela Lansbury. The couple, who divorced in 2009, has a son, Beckett, who became a teacher and transgender rights activist.
Sheedy is currently single, and in a 2022 interview, she said, “I am completely done with men. I have been for years. I just feel like I’ve been through so many different phases and this feels good to me. Now, if I could just stay in this place where I’m happy with my house and my dog. I have a few close friends, whom I love. This is enough.”
Anthony Michael Hall
Anthony Michael Hall briefly dated his costar Molly Ringwald in the ’80s. From 2008 to 2013, he dated YouTuber Trisha Paytas.
Hall has been married to model-actress Lucia Oskerova since 2020. In 2023, she gave birth to their son, Michael. Asked about becoming a dad later in life, Hall said, “I couldn’t be happier because I always knew, even when I was a young man, that I wanted to get started later. Here I am at 55, and I’m fully committed. I’m excited. My wife and I are really into parenting and diving in.”
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