He was the kind of boy who ended up taped to bedroom walls and tucked into school binders — the soft-spoken, soulful face of countless ’80s crushes. With tousled dark hair, a shy smile, and a quiet intensity, Andrew McCarthy made teenage longing feel oddly personal, like he was looking straight at you.
But behind the posters and polished publicity shots, his rise to fame was chaotic, and the life he was living off-camera was far more fragile than it looked.
From New Jersey kid to unexpected star
Born in 1962 in Westfield, New Jersey, Andrew McCarthy grew up far from Hollywood glamour. He was the third of four boys; his mother worked at a newspaper, and his father handled investments. It was a typical, middle-class East Coast upbringing — no industry connections, no obvious path to stardom.
As a teenager, he fell in love with performing, even as he struggled to fit in.
“I just felt sort of very lonely at school. I just didn’t feel like I belonged there,”
he once recalled.
After high school, he enrolled at NYU to study acting — and quickly flamed out.
“I didn’t really go [to class],”
he admitted later. He was expelled after two years.
Just weeks later, everything changed. Andrew answered an open casting call in a newspaper for a film called Class, starring Jacqueline Bisset.
“I waited for hours with 500 other kids and they call me back. It was so out of the blue. One week I was in school and the next week I’m in bed with Jacqueline Bisset. I thought, ‘I’m doing something right here,’”
he said.
His performance as Jonathan, the prep school student having an affair with his roommate’s mother, made Hollywood pay attention. NYU suddenly came calling again:
“Then [NYU] offered that I come back, pay the tuition and I could use [the movie] as independent study. I told them to go f*** themselves.”
Brat Pack fame and private pain
The mid-’80s turned Andrew McCarthy into a full-blown teen idol. He starred in St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) alongside Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, and Demi Moore; then came Pretty in Pink, where his quiet, understated charm opposite Molly Ringwald cemented his heartthrob status. Films like Mannequin and later Weekend at Bernie’s made him one of the most familiar faces of the decade.