A stylish elderly lady in an all-black outfit, a gray coat, and a black shoulder bag is shopping in New York in spring. She dashes around between various shops, then finally gets into a vehicle and drives away. It seems like a completely ordinary situation for a giant metropolis. But why does our brain start feverishly sorting through memories?
Where have we seen this lady? True, then she was still a dazzlingly talented young actress with that shiny dark hair and a piercing gaze… Bingo! It’s Ally Sheedy! Iconic actress of the 80s movies, for whom film critics predicted a brilliant future. And now she is… wait, wait, 62 years old. Oh my God, how time flies…
Ally Sheedy, now 62, was the glorious ‘Brat Pack’ member back in the 80s but had to accept the ebb and flow of an acting career since then
Image credits: The Image Direct / Vida Press
Sheedy’s breakthrough was the ‘Bad Boys’ movie (1983) with Sean Penn, and she was widely considered the next big thing
In the eighties, Ally Sheedy was a rising star of American cinema. Along with Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, and a couple of other young talents (later, Robert Downey Jr. was also included), they were dubbed the ‘Brat Pack’—an analogy of the iconic ‘Rat Pack’ of Frank Sinatra and his glorious friends from the sixties.
Ally shot to fame in ‘Bad Boys’ (1983), where her on-screen partner was a young Sean Penn, and in the mid-eighties, she was rightfully considered the next big thing. It seemed that the curve of her success was rising higher and higher—but after a series of unsuccessful movies at the box office, the actress practically stopped being invited to big roles.
Image credits: The Image Direct / Vida Press
However, the nineties brought the actress nearly nothing but frustration over her career
The approaching nineties required more relaxed behavior—both on and off screen—and Sheedy did not actually fit. “I was considered to be ice cold, uncastable, unhirable, unf**kable,” the actress said in an interview with Salon in 2016. As a result, the roles she was offered by her agents became fewer and fewer.
For example, remember the dialogue between Kevin McAllister from ‘Home Alone 2’ and the airport worker when the boy asks what city this is? Yes, that worker was Ally Sheedy, just seven years after ‘The Breakfast Club’ brought her stardom. A glimpse of her former glory was the 1998 film ‘High Art,’ for which she received an Independent Spirit Award and an LAFCA Award—but that was only for a moment.
Image credits: Variety / Getty Images
Sheedy then acted in episodes of various series, but a full-fledged return only happened in 2022, when she played the mother of the main character in the ‘Single Drunk Female’ series. She acted powerful and confident—just as she had in the past. Today, Ally Sheedy lives a quiet life as a theater professor at the City College of New York and also writes books under pseudonyms.
Image credits: The Breakfast Club / Universal Pictures
Now, the actress works as a theater professor in New York City and writes books under a pseudonym
She is no stranger to being a writer—after all, before Ally became a movie star, at the age of 13, she wrote a book, ‘She Was Nice to Mice,’ which was published by McGraw-Hill Education and became a true best-seller. Yes, she has aged, but decades away from the spotlight of the movie world haven’t made her any worse.
Image credits: WarGames / MGM
Numerous commenters on the Internet also noted that she is quite recognizable. She’s obviously happy with life and looks very natural. “Wow! She looks even prettier now and looks happy too. Good for her,” someone reasonably wrote in the comments. Well, as for aging—no one can avoid it, not even, for example, Tom Cruise.
Well, not everyone is destined to become a superstar, collect packs of Oscars, and slam the box office. In the end, the main thing is to be a happy person who’s satisfied with life. However, given the current craze for the eighties—who knows, maybe we’ll see Ally Sheedy on screen more than once? After all, the example of Don Ameche, who got his Oscar almost forty years after the peak of his acting career, is the best proof of this.
Some folks online said that she’s unrecognizable, but the majority claimed that she looks really nice and happy anyway
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