John Wilden Hughes, Jr. (February 18, 1950 – August 6, 2009) was an American
film director,
producer and
writer. He scripted some of the most successful films of the 1980s and early 1990s, including
National Lampoon's Vacation;
Ferris Bueller's Day Off;
Weird Science;
The Breakfast Club;
Some Kind of Wonderful;
Sixteen Candles;
Pretty in Pink;
Planes, Trains and Automobiles;
Uncle Buck;
Career Opportunities;
101 Dalmatians;
Home Alone,
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and
Home Alone 3.
Early life
Hughes was born in
Lansing, Michigan, to a mother who volunteered in charity work and John Hughes, Sr., who worked in sales.
He spent the first 12 years of his life in
Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Hughes described himself as a kid as "kind of quiet."
While admittedly not an athlete, Hughes was a devoted
Detroit Red Wings hockey fan and admired star player
Gordie Howe (Hughes later gave tribute to Howe in
Ferris Bueller's Day Off).
In 1962, Hughes's family moved to
Northbrook, Illinois, where Hughes’s father found work selling roofing materials.
Graduating from
Glenbrook North High School in 1968, Hughes used Northbrook and the adjacent
North Shore area for shooting locations and settings in many of his films, though he usually left the name of the town unsaid, or referred to it as "
Shermer, Illinois", Shermerville being the original name of Northbrook. In high school, he met Nancy Ludwig, to whom he was married from 1970 until his death. They had two sons, John Hughes III, born in 1976, and James Hughes, born in 1979.
