Rob Lowe’s wild youth

last updated 8 January 2015

Rob Lowe was once an “über-nerd,” said Vanessa Grigoriadis in Vanity Fair. The actor, 47, has been a heartthrob since he stepped onto a movie set in the 1980s, but he swears that wasn’t always the case. He grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and after his parents divorced, in his early teens, Lowe’s mother moved the family to swanky Malibu, Calif. “The cool girls in Malibu had no time for me,” he says. “I wasn’t a beach volleyball player, a surfer, or a quasi-burnout.”

After scoring a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, he became a member of Hollywood’s “Brat Pack.” Suddenly, he was dating beauties like Demi Moore and Nastassja Kinski; when he went out with Princess Stephanie of Monaco, he discovered that she had a poster of him on her wall “where I’m oiled like a rent boy, with my shirt off and sweatpants rolled down to my pubic hair.’’ For a decade, he competed with Charlie Sheen “to see who could play harder, then show up for work and still kick ass.” The winner? “Charlie by a nose,’’ Lowe says. He has no regrets. “The Brat Pack is timeless. We should all be so lucky to create things that we’re still talking about 25 years later.”