When Molly Ringwald was first approached to translate My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider, she said no. It’s not that she wasn’t interested in the late French actor, whose life was so horribly defined and dominated by Last Tango in Paris. Nor was it that she felt too close to the industry to tackle the life story of such a tragic figure. “The opposite,” she says, speaking to me from Vancouver, where she is filming the supernatural drama series Riverdale. “I felt my experience as an actor would only bring more to the project. Because I feel like I understood her.” It was just that she originally didn’t have time. Then the pandemic hit.
At the start of our video call, her camera isn’t working. It doesn’t matter, I say: just tell me what you look like. “I don’t want to do that,” she says, drily. Then her face appears: as camera-ready and photogenic at 55 as it was in the mid-80s when her career took off, but also relaxed, thoughtful, bespectacled. She looks like a film star playing an academic who was in the middle of reading something more interesting, but is patient enough to break off to talk to me for a bit.
