Saturdays with the Stars: Meg Ryan

Last month, as part of my quest to finish up the 2024 Saturdays with the Stars (completing lists is my favorite hobby and given our sixth season had two stars outstanding I felt a compelling need to complete it), we did our penultimate of America's Sweethearts for the series, crossing into the 21st Century for the first time with Julia Roberts.  This month, we're going to talk about our final of America's Sweethearts, a woman who rivaled Roberts in terms of popularity throughout the decade, to the point where she was compared to her in the movie Notting Hill (though to date they have not appeared onscreen together).  And like so many of our sweethearts this season, when the public realized she wasn't the cutesy personification that we saw on our movie screens, but instead a real-life woman who could make choices we disagreed with, the American public brutally punished her and essentially ended her career.  This month's star is Meg Ryan.

Ryan spent much of her early childhood and life living a relatively standard (for a young, late-stage Baby Boomer woman) life.  She grew up the daughter of educators in affluent Fairfield, Connecticut, and went to college at NYU, and even in college the plucky (a word that would be used about her her whole career) young actress was getting work in soap operas and commercials.  At the age of just 20 she made her film debut in legendary director George Cukor's final film (the dreadfully dull Rich and Famous), and throughout the 1980's she'd get prominent work (usually in relatively generic love interest roles) in films like Top Gun and Innerspace, before officially landing the role that would make her a superstar, one of the titular roles in When Harry Met Sally.

The 1990's are a fascinating decade when you think about Ryan, a talented and very popular actress who never really got the laurels that would go to some of her contemporaries.  Unlike Roberts, Sandra Bullock, & Demi Moore (her rivals for the decade's biggest female stars) she never was nominated for an Academy Award, despite much-loved work opposite Tom Hanks, and a dramatic turn in Courage Under Fire (which we'll investigate this month).  But it all came crashing down in 2000-01 when Ryan, until then largely avoiding the tabloid-scrutiny that her peer Roberts had endured for a decade thanks to her seemingly storybook marriage to actor Dennis Quaid, was caught in an affair with then emerging superstar Russell Crowe on the set of their picture Proof of Life.  We'll talk about that, and the textbook sexism that accompanied it (with his career skyrocketing while hers was destroyed) this month as we fall for one last America's Sweetheart.