Judd Nelson life and biography

Judd Nelson is an American actor. He is best known for being a member of the "Brat Pack" in the mid-1980s; and for his roles as John Bender in The Breakfast Club, Alec Newbary in St. Elmo's Fire, and Jack Richmond in Suddenly Susan.

Nelson was born in Portland, Maine, the son of Merle (née Royte), a court mediator and former member of the Maine state legislature, and Leonard Nelson, a corporate lawyer. His family is Jewish and his father was the first Jewish president of the Portland Symphony Orchestra. He has two sisters, Eve and Julie. He went to school at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and Waynflete School in Portland, Maine, and studied at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, leaving during his sophomore year. He subsequently moved to Manhattan to study acting with Stella Adler.

Even by the unexacting standard of Hollywood's 1980s "brat pack," actor Judd Nelson seemed wildly undisciplined and self-indulgent on screen. One tends to conclude that Nelson (a former philosophy student and the son of a Maine politician) has played his screen characters as written: he was, after all, very well trained by famed drama coach Stella Adler, and came up from the exacting ranks of summer stock. Among his earliest screen assignments -- all in his watershed year of 1985 -- including the dope-smoking detentionee in The Breakfast Club, Kevin Costner's parachute-jumping fraternity pal in Fandango, and Ally Sheedy's philandering live-in boyfriend in St. Elmo's Fire. Always seeming to be on the verge of punching someone out, Nelson was well cast as a mercurial killer in 1989's Relentless. Like many brat-packers, Judd Nelson has appeared in fewer and fewer films in the 1990s. In Tommy Chongs Far Out Man (1990), Nelson appears ingratiatingly as himself.

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