

A year later the mother of one of the girls (who turned out to be 16 and therefore underage according to state law) pressed charges against Lowe. While campaigning on behalf of Michael Dukakis at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, Lowe picked up two female fans in a nightclub and took them back to his hotel, where he filmed them having a threesome. "It's confusing when you're young and you don't really know your own identity."

"I wouldn't wish it on anybody," he says now. He also developed a drink problem and a rumoured sex addiction that led to rehab.

Lowe became the 1980s poster boy, partying hard with his co-stars and dating the requisite beautiful women, including Nastassja Kinski and Princess Stephanie of Monaco. The next year, St Elmo's Fire cast Lowe as a shiftless frat boy and ladies' man alongside a new generation of stars including Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson. His early roles in films such as Francis Ford Coppola's coming-of-age classic The Outsiders (1983) and the 1984 comedy Oxford Blues made him into a pin-up.

He is still excruciatingly pretty, but his features are so perfect that they appear slightly absurd. He lacks the grizzled charm, the lived-in creases of his near-contemporary Sean Penn. For many of us who grew up in the 1980s believing that leg warmers were the height of fashion, Rob Lowe epitomises the edgy-but-handsome leading man, the bad boy every girl wants to reform.įor much of his career, Lowe was defined by his looks, and yet he has never quite grown into them. Perhaps these outward manifestations of youthfulness are not entirely surprising for an actor who was catapulted into the limelight when barely out of his teenage years with roles such as Billy, the saxophone-playing rebel with big hair and a crucifix earring in 1985's St Elmo's Fire. He has three chunky beaded bracelets that resemble something a gap-year student would pick up from a Kathmandu market stall. I lived a Richard Curtis life."Īt the age of 45, he is wearing a Springsteen-esque grey T-shirt patriotically emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes and faded blue jeans that are a shade too stonewashed. "I said to my wife: 'If we are going to do this we are going to do it right.' I lived the life out of… ah… ah… who's the Notting Hill director?" On Eaton Terrace," he says, enunciating the street name slowly, as if speaking to a foreign taxi driver. We lived in Belgravia – it was beautiful. "Even though it was only six months, it felt like home. "I lived there for six months," he continues smoothly. "I just bought a coffee-table book of great London restaurants, and I read it and it made me so homesick."
