Long before her breakout film role in “Sixteen Candles,” Molly Ringwald began her TV acting career as a background character in “Diff’rent Strokes.” She played Molly Parker, one of Kimberly’s (Dana Plato) classmates at school. In her debut in the Season 1 finale, “The Girls School,” she’s a confident and fast-talking kid who remains that way in her follow-up appearance in Season 2’s “The Slumber Party.”
Speaking to the Sacramento Bee in 1980, Molly Ringwald described her character as “a 12-year-old who behaves like a 32-year-old feminist.” That’s the role she continued to play when NBC created a spin-off for “Diff’rent Strokes” called “The Facts of Life,” where Ringwald stuck around as part of the main cast for the entire first season. Both sitcoms are available for free on Tubi, and they’re among some of the best shows available on the platform.
Although Ringwald was young at the time, she’d already been a performer for most of her life. Prior to “Diff’rent Strokes” she’d played the lead role in a San Francisco production of the musical “Annie,” and appeared in a stage production of “Alice in Wonderland” at just five years old. During her “Facts of Life” run, she told reporters, “There is no way I want to do anything else in my life except be an actress. But if I have to, I’ll be a veterinarian.”
Molly Ringwald was fired from The Facts of Life after just one season
Although “The Facts of Life” was a hit show that ran for nine years, Molly Ringwald’s character was only in the first season. The producers thought the show’s cast was too large for a half-hour show to do all the characters justice, so they fired four main cast members in Season 2, Ringwald included. The star told Entertainment Weekly that receiving the news she had been fired was “kind of hard as a 12-year-old girl.” She added, “They wanted something closer to Lisa Whelchel, who played Blair, they wanted something closer to her age and I was too young at the time. I was a little bit of a different generation.”
Luckily things would soon pick back up for the star. In 1984, she landed her big film role in “Sixteen Candles.” From that point on, she had no need to worry about the world of television anymore. In the ’90s, she would return to TV with the ABC miniseries “The Stand,” but she was now the show’s biggest name and had no concerns about her character being written out. Still, that early career disappointment left a mark on her. “It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been a little bit reticent,” she said. “My daughter has expressed interest in acting, and, at first, I was just shutting it down completely.”