Duckie Turns 44: Happy Birthday, Jon Cryer

It pains me to realize that Jon Cryer is 44 years old today. I had a similar reaction a few years ago, when I discovered that Robert Carradine was playing the father on Lizzie McGuire -- there's just no way I could wrap my brain around the idea of Revenge of the Nerds' Lewis Skolnick as a suburban dad. Also, this meant that I, myself, was therefore old enough to be the parent of a teenager, and that's wrong in oh, so many ways.

So it's with mixed emotions that I wish a happy birthday to Jon Cryer. Once I get past my own not-inconsiderable baggage, I'm able to to say without a shred of irony that I adore him. Unsurprisingly, I first fell in love with Cryer in Pretty in Pink, and his lip-sync to Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" remains one of my favorite set-pieces from the 80's. (A little PiP trivia: Writer-director John Hughes originally intended for Duckie to get the girl, but he was overruled by the studio. So Hughes followed up with Some Kind of Wonderful, which is essentially the same film gender-reversed, with the ending he wanted.)



Following Pretty in Pink, there was an attempt to turn Cryer into a top-billed star, but it didn't really work. The Ferris Bueller-flavored Morgan Stewart's Coming Home proved that Cryer was a tad too goofy to be the next Matthew Broderick or John Cusack, and his appearance in the abysmal Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was just embarrassing (go look up the trailer, and you'll hear him drawl the immortal line, "Dude of Steel ... you're gonna get it!")

But I'll defend to the death Cryer's work in 1987's Hiding Out, directed by music-video pioneer Bob Giraldi. Playing a 30-ish stock broker who hides from the mob by pretending to be a high-school student, Cryer somehow pulled off the silly premise, and even managed to make a budding romance with a high-school age girl (Annabeth Gish) more charming than creepy. In this clip, check out the hair on waitress Joy Behar:



In the 90's, Cryer appeared more often on TV than in films, including one season as star of the not-so-bad sitcom The Amazing Teddy Z, in which he was consistently upstaged by the hilarious Alex Rocco:



In 2003, Cryer was cast as Charlie Sheen's brother in Two and a Half Men, another not-so-bad sitcom. This time, he seems to have found the right balance of co-star, premise and script, and the show remains, as of this writing, a hit.

As for movies -- Cryer appears in Stay Cool, the latest film from Michael and Mark Polish, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month. And he plays the dad in Robert Rodriguez's next kid-vid flick, Shorts, the trailer for which gave me a pounding headache behind my right eye.

Yeah, Duckie plays the dad. Sigh.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Cryer. I hope you feel younger today than I do.