THERE is Rob Lowe's life, and Rob Lowe's on-screen life and sometimes there isn't much to choose between them. Sam Seaborn, his deputy communications officer in hit US series The West Wing slept with a call girl in the first episode and then flew into a panic about whether it would cost him his career.
Lowe picked up two girls at a Democratic Convention in Atlanta at the height of his Brat Pack fame in 1988 and had sex with them on videotape, which soon returned to haunt him and all those who saw it. It did cost him his career, at least for a few y
ears, forced as he was to appear in such memorable classics as, The Finest Hour.
Fast forward to 2006 and Lowe was playing a Republican senator, Robert McCallister, in another hit US series, Brothers & Sisters. In the first ever episode his character was accused of having an affair with the nanny.
Back in the real world, 44-year-old Lowe last week filed a suit against a former nanny, demanding damages of at least $1m and charging her with violating a confidentiality agreement, defamation and infliction of emotional distress on him, his wife and their two sons. His claim? That the nanny was trying to blackmail him for $1.5m. Oh, and that she fancied him.
It started on Monday when Lowe posted a heartfelt, dramatic and occasionally nonsensical blog on The Huffington Post, the liberal website run by US columnist and socialite Arianna Huffington. In it, he alleged that his former nanny, who had worked for the Lowes on and off for years, showed up after abandoning her post unexpectedly and demanded hush money for keeping her lips sealed. Otherwise, she claimed she would go to the press with allegations of harassment. Lowe was mortified, incensed, morally affronted you might even say. Maybe that's why in his impassioned public declaration, he made no sense whatsoever.
"A former employee is demanding my wife Sheryl and I pay her $1.5m by the end of the week or she will accuse us both of a vicious laundry list of false terribles," he blogged. A vicious laundry list? Just what would that entail? Perhaps a particularly nasty old pair of boxers, or a bra with its underwire dangerously poking out. And what of these false terribles Lowe mentions. They sound like untrustworthy, evil little blighters.
There is, of course, nothing we like more than an A-lister with a less than clean personal history attempting to clamber up on their high horse. Lowe, who in his blog extracted a couple of the nanny's Blackberry messages sent to his wife after she disappeared, wrote about living "in a time where public figures are targets". He referred to his "18 years of sobriety" and promised, or perhaps threatened: "I will not go away. No one intimidates my family."
This last, brawny line could well have been taught to him by his pal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for whom Lowe campaigned in the election for governor of California. Interestingly, Lowe started out in life as a Democrat, and is now a Republican, while on screen, he went from left to right playing Seaborn then McCallister.
Lowe has also filed separate lawsuits against another ex-nanny and chef, accusing them too of violating confidentiality agreements, and the chef of engaging in sex on their bed while they were away. In a further twist, Lowe has since opted not to file a criminal complaint against the nanny he wrote about in his blog and has declined any police intervention in the matter, saying he wants to deal with it in a "civil" manner.
If anyone, though, can wear the storm of public scandal and the airing of dirty (and vicious?) laundry, it's Lowe. With a jaw so square it would blunt the sharpest of knives, those piercing blue eyes and a pearly-white smile flashy enough to make Scientologists weep with envy, Lowe's past tells the classic Hollywood tale of the naughty pretty boy gone good (ish).
Born in Virginia and brought up in Ohio, Lowe's parents divorced when he was 12. By the age of eight he knew he wanted to be an actor. Sean Penn was his classmate at school, while the Lowes lived across the road from the Sheens, so the young Rob also made friends with Charlie and Emilio Estevez before the mullets came out and the words 'brat' and 'pack' would be conjoined forevermore in history.
It was getting cast in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, alongside Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Emilio Estevez in 1983 that did it. The Brat Pack was forming. Two years later, the signature Brat Pack flicks came out, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo's Fire, with the roguish, earring-sporting Lowe as the chiselled teen pin-up. Lowe was suddenly the Adonis of the Eighties, with a gang that included Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy.
Then it all went a bit wrong. Lowe was caught after that infamous night when the girls took the sex tape away with them (it became one of the first mass-marketed celebrity sex tapes of its kind) and 10 months later the 16-year-old's mother filed a law suit. Lowe got 20 hours' community service and ended up in rehab.
"There were times when I have undermined everything I was trying to accomplish," he said years later.
He has also mused: "When I was young and crazy, I was young and crazy."
He has credited his wife of almost two decades, make-up artist Sheryl Berkoff, for standing by him. His career bounced back, though, when he sent up his Eighties persona while hosting Saturday Night Live. Mike Myers was impressed by Lowe's gift for comedy and cast him in Wayne's World, and later the Austin Powers movies. Ironically though, it has been since he moved into television that he has become really big in Hollywood.
The West Wing – dubbed The Left Wing by Republicans – was so successful that Lowe recalls meeting up with Bill Clinton to hear him pitch story lines. After four years, however, after disputes with the show's writer Aaron Sorkin – Lowe reportedly wasn't happy his character had become sidelined by the success of others such as Martin Sheen's President Bartlet – he left and has found yet more renewed success in Brothers & Sisters alongside Calista Flockhart and Sally Field.
What next, though, for the wild card of the Brat Pack? Judging by what's come before, we need only look to his roles. A glance at his IMDB profile reveals that next up is a part in Ricky Gervais's This Side Of The Truth. The tagline is "A comedy set in a world where no one has ever lied, until a writer seizes the opportunity for personal gain." Sounds juicy.
In 2000 Rob Lowe was voted one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world by People magazine.
You've been Googled• Lowe is deaf in his right ear.
• Lowe was one of the nine original members of the Eighties Brat Pack, alongside Judd Nelson, Mare Winningham, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, inset, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Andrew McCarthy, though actors from Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon to Matthew Broderick and Charlie Sheen are sometimes included under the term.
• After leaving The West Wing following disputes with the writer Aaron Sorkin, Lowe reunited with him to play the rookie lawyer in Sorkin's west end production of A Few Good Men. It was the role originally played by Tom Cruise in the film version.
• Lowe is a self-described "political junkie" who sold Kool-Aid door to door when he was eight for the Democratic contender George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. He has since, however, become a Republican supporter.
