Vanessa Schneider and Molly Ringwald discuss female representation and experience in the film industry.

In her moving book, My Cousin Maria Schneider, recently published in the U.S. by Schneider and translated by Molly Ringwald, Vanessa Schneider recounts not only her relationship with her cousin, actress Maria Schneider, but also Schneider’s life and experiences in the film industry, including the controversial film The Last Tango in Paris. As the book echoes Molly Ringwald’s own story as an actress, the discussion is both touching and timely. The discussion is moderated by Thessaly La Force, writer and regular contributor to The New York Times.

The discussion is followed by a Q&A session.

Vanessa Schneider is a French journalist and author of the bestselling and award-winning memoir Tu T’Appelais Maria Schneider, published in France in 2018. Vanessa is also the author of nine other books, including the two novels La Mère de ma mère and Do Not Go Crazy. Tu T’Appelais Maria Schneider is her first publication translated into English, and it will be adapted to screen by Jessica Palud with actress Annamaria Vartolomei as Maria Schneider. Vanessa is currently a reporter at “Le Monde” in France and regularly contributes to the programs C dans l’air on France 5.

Star of stage, screen and television, Molly Ringwald’s credits include Ryan Murphy’s upcoming series Feud, and was in Murphy’s Netflix mini-series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a cameo in the FX critically acclaimed series The Bear, and is in the upcoming Bad Things which will premiere in the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival in the U.S Narrative Competition section. Molly was in the film All These Small Moments which was released in January 2019 by Orion Classics and is on VOD (premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival), an arc on The Netflix series Tales of the City, Netflix’s film series The Kissing Booth, CW’s Riverdale, and the off-Broadway production of Terms of Endearment. Known for the iconic films Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, Ringwald began her film career in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest, also starring in The Pick-Up Artist, For Keeps, Fresh Horses, Betsy’s Wedding, and the foreign films Tous Les Jours Dimanches, Enfants de Salaud, and Goddard’s King Lear. Other theater includes Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, the Broadway production of Cabaret as “Sally Bowles”, the Broadway production of Enchanted April, the London production of When Harry Met Sally, Horton Foote’s Lily Dale off-Broadway, Jonathan Larson’s Tick, Tick…Boom!, Modern Orthodox.

An accomplished author and translator her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, The Guardian, and more. Her translation of the French novel Lie with Me (April 2019) and the memoir “Your Name Was Maria Schneider (2022) are both for Scribner.

Thessaly La Force is a writer and editor based in New York City. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has worked at : The New York Times Style Magazine, Garage Magazine, Vogue, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.