The Brat Pack Then and Now
Nov. 18, 2009— -- Anthony Michael Hall may have played the ultimate geek as a Brat Pack star of the 1980s.
But last week, the grown-up Hall, now 41, was ordered to stay away from his ex-girlfriend, Diana Falzone, after he allegedly attacked her in her New York apartment.
According to the New York Post, Falzone, a Sirius radio host and relationship columnist for the Huffington Post, obtained a temporary restraining order against Hall. She told police last Tuesday that Hall tried to kick down her door. When she let him in, he allegedly bashed her head against the wall.
Ironically, Hall is about to guest star as a campus bully on the NBC comedy "Community." It's a far cry from Hall's breakout role playing a geek in the 1980s John Hughes classics "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club" and "Weird Science."
Hall and seven other stars of the 1980s, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy, were dubbed the Brat Pack -- a play on the Rat Pack, the name given in the 1960s to the group of stars including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. -- by a 1985 New York magazine cover story.
The name stuck. Most of the Brat Packers struggled to ditch their iconic '80s roles and find success in the '90s and beyond.
For Hall, the road has been bumpy. Hall once admitted that he began drinking at age 13 and, as the youngest "Saturday Night Live" regular at 17, confessed: "I sometimes got in fights and punched people in the face and got drunk." He claims to have become sober in 1990.
In the '90s he starred in a few low-budget movies and a couple standout ones: "Edward Scissorhands" and "Six Degrees of Separation." But his real comeback came in 2002, when he became the star of the USA cable series "Dead Zone," playing a small town teacher whose powers help him solve crimes.
Despite his newfound success, Hall was allegedly still prone to violence. According to the Post, an insurance firm sued Hall for not disclosing that he had bipolar disorder. The lawsuit claimed that Hall suffered an episode of "bipolar affective disorder depression with psychotic features" that put him in a Vancouver hospital for a day.
Hall's spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from ABCNews.com.
