Why Weird Science Pin-Up Kelly LeBrock Left Hollywood

Kelly LeBrock left Hollywood not long after ‘Weird Science’ was released 30 years ago this weekend.

“My children were and are my most important thing and so to say no to Hollywood was very easy,” says the now-55-year-old. “I didn’t care about being famous. I’d already done that with modelling. I always said I could never go back to my kids, but I could always go back to my films.”

It must have annoyed her agent no end. The English model-turned-actress had already been a hugely successful cover star after being scouted as a teenager and had hit comedy ‘Woman in Red’ with Gene Wilder, as well as John Hughes’s ‘Weird Science’ under her belt.

In quitting the scene, she turned down starring roles in Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ and ‘Beetlejuice’ – as well as the lead in ‘Carry on Emmannuelle’ – only occasionally popping up in films like ‘Hard to Kill’, which she did as a favour to then-husband Steven Seagal (below). “I call ‘Hard to Kill’ Hard to Watch or Hard to Believe,” she says now.

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LeBrock’s bitter and acrimonious split from the action star, which she has said involved some awful abuse, only solidified her intention to remain outside the movie bubble on a ranch in Northern California.

“My [three] kids have been raised in the middle of nowhere, we were home every night and I made a meal most nights,” she says. “They’re very normal, I put them in school with the plumbers and electricians.”

Still, despite growing up a shy student at an all-girls boarding school in England, LeBrock had always loved being on-stage.

Having married movie producer Victor Drai in 1984, she took the lead in his remake of French flick ‘Pardon Mon Affaire’, renamed ‘Woman in Red’ (see below), in which she emulated Marilyn Monroe’s famous skirt-blowing opposite Gene Wilder.

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‘Weird Science’ came in 1985, a wish-fulfilment comedy in which two nerds create the perfect woman on a computer.

“I had actually turned down ‘Weird Science’ initially because I was in the South of France with Sting,” she reveals. “I was with my first husband, he was doing a movie there. I was like, ‘work or play with Sting?’ and I decided not to work.”

But Hughes persisted.

“They gave the role to somebody else, but three weeks into filming they had to dismiss her because she wasn’t right for the role,” LeBrock explains. “They called me and within a couple of hours I was on a plane from France to Chicago.

“They were in really big trouble. They’d filmed for three weeks with someone and they couldn’t use any of the footage. We didn’t even time to change the wardrobe and she had a completely different body type to me. They had to slice the clothing in the back to let my body fit into it.”

Co-starring Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan Mitchell-Smith and a young Robert Downey Jr. (“He was a little s**t, he was definitely a little bit different.”), the movie really caught fire on VHS.

“It did well, but it didn’t have the opening my first film ‘Woman in Red’ did,” says LeBrock. “I don’t think they promoted it very well, but it’s gone on to be a cult film.”

The comedy was in cinemas when she met Seagal and she quickly became pregnant.

She’s both funny and sanguine about her ex now, who she divorced in 1996 after nine years of marriage.

“Who? Who?” she jokes when asked about the ‘Under Siege’ star, adding, “I am onward, I am forward, I’ve forgiven and I’ve forgotten. I’m actually helping a lot of people with abuse. I’ve just been asked to speak at Princetown [about it]. I’m going to go out and make a difference.”

Having raised her family – her three children are all now in their 20s and only youngest daughter Arissa is thinking about following in her parents’ acting footsteps – she has made her way quietly back onto the screen again, appearing in everything from reality series ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ (below) and ‘Celebrity Fit Club’ to this year’s ’10 Days in a Madhouse’ which co-stars Christopher Lambert.

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“It did very nicely at the Cannes Film Festival recently,” she says of the latter, in which she plays a cruel nurse at a mental institution. “If you sneeze you’ll miss my role, but it’s an integral part and I was very well-noticed. Now I care about my career and I’d like to get it back and I’m going to get noticed as an actor and I’d like to get an award one day.”

She recently re-connected with her ‘Weird Science’ co-stars at an autograph-signing event and Hall stayed at her ranch, where “I slaughter my own animals, I grow my own vegetables and make my own cheese.”

She still misses England. “It’s in my veins,” she says, admitting that she gets annoyed when customs officers think she’s an American. “I was just in New York and I went to a place that sells English food and bought myself some English bangers and had a nice sausage sandwich and a cup of tea.”

Is she surprised we’re still talking about ‘Weird Science’ 30 years later?

“I look back on it with enormous fondness,” she says. “John Hughes knew how to touch the hearts of every teenager out there. The world has changed so much in 30 years, but I’m honoured I still look like myself, I’m a little more wrinkly, but I’m very proud to be around after all this time.”

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So one last very important question: do Lisa and Wyatt have sex off-camera in the movie?

“F*** no! That would be disgusting,” she cries. “When we had to do that kissing scene, he stuck his tongue down my throat and every hair on the back of my spine went up. When John Hughes called cut, I said to [Ilan Mitchell-Smith], ‘if you ever do that again I’m going to pull your tongue out.’ It was very disturbing.”

“Still,” she says, ‘they’ll always be my boys.”

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