Whatever Happened To Ralphie Actor Peter Billingsley From A Christmas Story?

Ever since the days of vaudeville (and long before that even), entertainment seekers have enjoyed the work of child actors. Good child actors, that is. A bad child performance can throw a dent into the most sturdiest of productions (see the, as harsh it may sound, awful kid turns in the otherwise perfect "It's a Wonderful Life"), and there must be a ring of hell occupied by the person who came up with the idea of school holiday pageants.

While we're on the topic of the holidays, and in the interest of steering this back toward the merry side of things, how about that Peter Billingsley? He's practically the Child King of December thanks to his indelible portrayal of Ralphie Parker in Bob Clark's 1983 classic "A Christmas Story." If you weren't around back then, Billingsley was anything but an unknown quality. He'd assaulted our living rooms during Saturday morning cartoon commercial breaks as the Hershey's chocolate syrup mascot Messy Marvin (he made a mess when he made and drank chocolate milk), and was a familiar video store face via the VHS cover of the R-rated horror flick "Death Valley." He also became a child correspondent for the popular reality program "Real People" (which waged a fierce competition with the similarly themed "That's Incredible" throughout Ronald Reagan's first presidential term), and made a memorable guest appearance on "Little House on the Prairie" before hitting the big time as the star of the Christmas movie you will not be able to escape once Thanksgiving is over.

Billingsley was big time in 1983, and not much else as a performer thereafter. But he didn't completely disappear. What did he do after shooting his eye out?

Continued stardom eluded Billingsley after "A Christmas Story," but it wasn't for a lack of trying. He popped up on single episodes of popular family shows like "The Wonder Years" and "Punky Brewster," and starred in the amazing-if-you're-10 comedy-adventure "The Dirt Bike Kid." He also did a couple of CBS Schoolbreak Specials, meeting future collaborator Vince Vaughn on the set of "The Fourth Man" (not the Paul Verhoeven erotic thriller).

As Billingsley entered his 20s in the early 1990s, he responded to the sputtering of his acting career by working behind the scenes. After dabbling in short films and television production, he hooked up with his buddy Vaughn and Jon Favreau to co-produce their 2001 comedy "Made." It was at this time that he began producing Favreau's roundtable talk show "Dinner for Five," for which Billingsley received a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2005. His movie work with Vaughn and Favreau continued as well, leading to him snagging an executive producer credit on a little movie called "Iron Man" in 2008.

Billingsley has remained a television and film producer for the most part, but he did reprise his role as Ralphie Parker in the Max film "A Christmas Story Christmas." Though it couldn't recapture the raucous magic of Bob Clark's original, it was a sweetly nostalgic trip down memory lane for everyone who grew up watching and watching and watching the movie that confirmed kids' fears about department store Santas. We raise our air rifles to you, Peter Billingsley!