Former EastEnders actor Jack Ryder, 44, has disclosed that his father is a rockstar who enjoyed chart success in the 1980s. Ryder, who played Jamie Mitchell on the BBC soap from 1998 to 2002, said his father Jeremy Allan Ryder, 77, performed under the stage name Jack Hues as frontman of the new wave band Wang Chung.
Wang Chung is best known for their 1986 hit 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight', which reached number two in the US and number one in Canada, though it peaked at 76 in the UK. The group also had success with 'Don't Let Go' and 'Dance Hall Days', both of which topped the US Dance Chart in 1984, and contributed music to the 1985 film The Breakfast Club.
Ryder told The Sun: 'My dad was a famous pop star in America in the Eighties and [we have] talked about this a lot. He never enjoyed fame and always found it confusing, and I think I felt much the same way.' Ryder himself found the heartthrob status difficult to handle, saying: 'Being a heartthrob was never something I really aligned with. I never quite understood it and I found it difficult to deal with, especially the frenzy of it all.'
After leaving EastEnders in 2002, Ryder's character was killed off in a storyline nominated for a British Soap Award. Since then, he has appeared in Radio 4's The Archers and Holby City, and built a career as a theatre director, working on West End productions such as Calendar Girls and Gary Barlow's musicals. In 2020, he published his first children's book, Jack's Secret Summer.
