Michael Schoeffling

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Image:Schoeffling.jpg Michael Schoeffling (born 1959 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and raised in South Jersey) is a retired actor.

1 Career
2 Education
3 Wrestling
4 Movies
5 TV
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Career

Schoeffling is best known for his role as Jake Ryan, a legendary lust object amongst generations of fans, in Sixteen Candles. This spurred the Washington Post to run an article titled "Real Men Can't Hold a Match to Jake Ryan of Sixteen Candles" on Valentine's Day, 2004 -- a full twenty years after its American premiere -- as a testament to his (and his character's) enduring popularity.

He has not been able to duplicate that same level of success with any of his succeeding film work, however. He stated that the dearth of roles and a family to feed were his reasons for his retirement from acting. He now runs his own business, a woodworking shop that produces handcrafted furniture, and lives in northeastern Pennsylvania with his wife, fellow former model Valerie Robinson, and their two teenaged children.

[edit] Education

Michael graduated from Cherokee High School in New Jersey and majored in Liberal Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. He then began modeling in the mid-1980s for GQ and star photographer Bruce Weber to pay for his acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Manhattan.

[edit] Wrestling

An accomplished youth and collegiate wrestler, he medaled in national and international tournaments including winning a gold medal for the United States in freestyle wrestling, as a member of the National Junior Wrestling Team in the European Championships held in Munich, Germany in 1978. His considerable wrestling skills were downplayed as "Kuch" in Vision Quest where he wrestled Matthew Modine, his best friend in the movie and lost by fall in a wrestle-off.