Molly Ringwald Conceived Her Daughter in the ‘Dressing Room at Studio 54’

Molly Ringwald thinks she can pinpoint the exact — and fairly public — moment her motherhood journey began.

“I believe that Mathilda was conceived in the dressing room at Studio 54 right at the end of my run playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret in 2003,” Ringwald, 56, told The Times in an interview published on Wednesday, April 3. “It’s so Mathilda to be conceived in such an iconic place.”

Ringwald noted that while she “always” knew she wanted children, conceiving took longer than expected. “I was 36 when [Mathilda] was born,” she explained. “At that age the biological clock is a real thing and it had kind of become deafening. All I could think about was: must have kids.”

Ringwald shares Mathilda, now 20, with husband Panio Gianopoulos. The couple are also parents to fraternal twins Adele and Roman, 14. And although becoming a mom was the right choice for Ringwald, she quickly learned it isn’t always easy.

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“The hardest thing about motherhood was realizing that my time was not my own,” she explained to The Times. “As an actress, I’ve traveled a lot and learned to live with instability, but that’s not great for kids. That’s something I am always looking to improve on and luckily I have a husband who is a planner and is very stable.”

Ringwald and Gianopoulos tied the knot in 2007, five years after Ringwald’s split from ex-husband Valery Lameignère in 2002. During a January 2011 interview with Good Housekeeping, Ringwald revealed that Gianopoulos agreed to have kids sooner than he initially planned — the couple have a seven-year age gap between them — due to her desire to expand their family.

“He’s seven years younger than me, and I was pushing for kids, so he decided to do it while he was younger than he had originally anticipated being,” she told the outlet, before giving her husband credit for being the “natural” parent in the relationship.

Ringwald rose to stardom in the ‘80s, making a name for herself by landing roles in various teen classics like Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. As her children have grown older, Ringwald has admitted to struggling over whether to show her kids her earlier films as some contain controversial material.

“My daughter, Adele, is the most woke individual you’ve ever met,” she told Andy Cohen during an October 2021 appearance on SiriusXM, noting that she hasn’t “found the strength” to share her famous roles with her two younger kids. “I just don’t know how I’m going to go through that, you know, watching it with her and [her] saying, ‘How could you do that? How could you be part of something [like] that?’”

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Ringwald has also admitted that despite her distinction as rom-com royalty, her children still think of her the same way everyone else pictures their parents: embarrassing.

“In terms of being a teen queen and being the parent of a teenager, you would think that it would give me some points and make me a little cooler. It doesn’t at all, it means absolutely nothing to them,” she said during a September 2022 talk for the Center for Parent and Teen Communications. “To them, I’m just their mom and I’m just as dorky and out of touch… as every other mom.”