40 Heartthrobs Of The 1980s And Their Partners

The 1980s did something specific with male stardom. Posters, magazine covers, merchandise: for the first time the leading man was sold directly to a teenage audience as a product, at scale, with the machinery to match.

Everything in this collection sits on top of that. The public face was designed to look available to an enormous audience. The private arrangement underneath it is usually the exact opposite.

The Heartthrob Was A Manufactured Category

The teen magazine industry of the period was substantial, and it needed a steady supply of faces. Studios and record labels supplied them, and a performer could be elevated to heartthrob status on the strength of one role.

It was a narrow category to be placed in and a difficult one to leave. Several of the careers here are shaped less by the work than by the effort to escape the label the marketing attached.

What The Private Side Actually Looked Like

The image being sold was availability. The reality across these forty names is noticeably more settled than that.

Three things recur:

• Many were already attached at the height of it. Publicity generally preferred this not to be prominent, for straightforward commercial reasons.
• The partner is usually outside the industry. Same pattern as the wider Hollywood list - the durable pairings tend not to be two performing careers.
• The ones who left the category early lasted longest. Performers who moved into character work while still young generally kept working. The ones who held the heartthrob position too long mostly did not.

Why The 1980s Specifically

The combination that made this possible - mass-market teen magazines, music television, and a studio system still able to place a performer in front of an enormous audience at once - existed for a relatively short window. It had largely broken up by the late 1990s and has never reassembled in the same form.

Forty Performers, Just Over Eight Minutes

Just over eight minutes, forty performers, both photographs together. The rest of the section is in Love Stories.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Forty performers from the decade that turned the leading man into merchandise. Watch above, then see the wider partners collection.