What Happened to Ricky Schroder? A Secret Beach Wedding in 2026

If you owned a television in the 1980s, you knew that face. The blond mop, the go-kart racing through a Manhattan penthouse, the kid who cried so convincingly opposite Jon Voight that he walked away with a Golden Globe at age nine. Ricky Schroder was one of the most recognizable children on the planet — and then he grew up, dropped the “y,” and quietly built a second career most child stars never get. So where is he now? The answer involves Afghanistan, a Colorado ranch, and a wedding nobody knew about until a month after it happened.

01Profile

Full name

Richard Bartlett Schroder

Born

April 13, 1970 (56 years old)

Birthplace

Brooklyn, New York City, USA

Occupation

Actor, director, producer

Also billed as

Rick Schroder (from the late 1980s onward)

Best known for

"The Champ" (1979), "Silver Spoons" (1982–87), "Lonesome Dove" (1989), "NYPD Blue" (1998–2001)

Family

Married Julie Trammel in July 2025; four adult children from his first marriage

Two names, two careers. “Ricky” belongs to the kid on the lunchbox; “Rick” is the guy who spent four months embedded with special operations forces in Afghanistan with a camera. Both are the same person, and the distance between them is basically the whole story.

02The Rise: A Golden Globe at Nine

The Champ and an unprecedented award

Schroder was born in Brooklyn in 1970 and started modeling as a toddler. His film debut came in 1979 with Franco Zeffirelli’s “The Champ,” a remake of the 1931 boxing melodrama, in which he played the young son of Jon Voight’s washed-up fighter. The performance — specifically its devastating final scene — became a benchmark for on-screen crying.

In January 1980, at age nine, he won the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture, making him the youngest Golden Globe winner in the award’s history. That record has stood ever since. It is an almost absurd way to begin a career: peak critical recognition before you’ve finished fourth grade.

Silver Spoons and total ’80s saturation

Three years later he became a genuine household name. “Silver Spoons” premiered on NBC in 1982 with Schroder as Ricky Stratton, a sensible boy sent to live with his enormously wealthy, enormously immature father (Joel Higgins) in a mansion equipped with an indoor train and an arcade. The show ran through 1987 and earned Schroder two Young Artist Awards.

For roughly five years he was inescapable — a fixture on the covers of Tiger Beat and 16, the kind of fame where kids write letters to a boy they’ve never met. Then the show ended, and he was 17.

03The Hard Part: Growing Up On Camera

Here’s the part of the child-star arc that rarely makes headlines because it isn’t dramatic — it’s just hard. The roles thinned out. Casting directors saw a blond sitcom kid, not an actor. Schroder’s response was unusually deliberate: rather than chasing teen-idol work, he dropped the “y” from his professional name and started auditioning as Rick Schroder, betting that a different name would buy him a different first impression.

• 1979Film debut in "The Champ" opposite Jon Voight.
• 1980Wins the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year at age nine — the youngest winner in the award's history.
• 1982–87Stars as Ricky Stratton on NBC's "Silver Spoons" for five seasons.
• 1989Plays Newt Dobbs in CBS's "Lonesome Dove" alongside Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones — the role that resets his adult career.
• 1992Marries Andrea Bernard on September 26. The couple go on to have four children.
• 1998–2001Joins "NYPD Blue" as Detective Danny Sorenson, appearing in 58 episodes.
• 2004Directorial debut with "Black Cloud," a drama about a Navajo boxer.
• 2016Bernard files for divorce after more than 20 years of marriage.
• 2025Marries theater actress Julie Trammel in a private ceremony in Cabo San Lucas.

The bet paid off in 1989. “Lonesome Dove,” the CBS adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel, cast him as Newt Dobbs opposite Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones and Anjelica Huston. It remains one of the most acclaimed Westerns ever made for television, and Schroder — 19 at the time — held his own in it. Overnight, he stopped being the Silver Spoons kid to the people who did the hiring.

Nearly a decade later came the other defining adult role: Detective Danny Sorenson on ABC’s “NYPD Blue,” where he replaced Jimmy Smits and stayed for three seasons and 58 episodes. Following Smits into that show was, by any measure, a thankless assignment. He did it anyway.

04Behind the Camera

Directing, producing, and a 15,000-acre detour

By the mid-2000s Schroder had shifted much of his energy behind the camera. He made his directorial debut in 2004 with “Black Cloud,” a drama about a Navajo boxer that he also wrote, and followed it with television and family features including “Our Wild Hearts” (2013), which he co-wrote with his daughter Cambrie.

He also became, for a stretch, a genuine rancher. Schroder owned Mesa Mood Ranch, a roughly 15,000-acre working ranch near Grand Junction, Colorado, adjacent to the Grand Mesa National Forest, for about 16 years before selling it in 2006. Colorado has remained his home base in the years since.

The Fighting Season

His most ambitious project was documentary work. Schroder spent time embedded with U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan in 2014, gathering footage that became “The Fighting Season,” a 2015 documentary series following American troops during a fighting season in Afghanistan. It was an unglamorous, physically demanding assignment for a man who could have coasted on nostalgia bookings, and it reframed him for a lot of people as a filmmaker rather than a former child star.

05What He Is Doing Now

The wedding nobody knew about

The biggest recent news in Schroder’s life happened quietly and stayed quiet for six weeks. On July 9, 2025, he married theater actress Julie Trammel at the Four Seasons in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in a beach ceremony attended by exactly two people: the bride and groom. They had obtained their marriage license at the Ouray County courthouse in Colorado a week earlier, on July 2. Schroder was 55; Trammel was 40.

The couple didn’t announce it at the time. The news only surfaced when they shared photographs from the ceremony on Instagram on August 20, 2025, prompting coverage from UPI, People and others. According to reporting on their statement, the two met through a mutual friend, and Schroder proposed by the fireside at home over Memorial Day weekend the previous year.

Our hearts are grateful, our consciousness has increased and our spirits awakened. — Ricky Schroder and Julie Trammel, joint statement reported by People, August 2025

Trammel, a stage performer whose credits include “The Sound of Music,” took the surname Schroder after the wedding. It is Schroder’s second marriage; he was married to Andrea Bernard from September 1992 until she filed for divorce in 2016, and the couple have four adult children together.

A public and political profile

Schroder has been one of the more openly political figures among actors of his generation, and has identified as a Republican for decades — he spoke at the 2000 Republican National Convention. In November 2020, multiple major outlets reported that he contributed $150,000 toward bail for Kyle Rittenhouse. He has also drawn coverage for videos he posted himself during the pandemic era, including a May 2021 recording of a dispute with a Costco employee over mask policy, for which he subsequently apologized publicly. He remains active on social media, where politics sits alongside family photos and ranch scenery.

Still working, on his own terms

Now 56, Schroder continues to take on acting, directing and producing work through his own production company rather than chasing studio calls. It is a version of a Hollywood career that looks nothing like the one predicted for the nine-year-old with the Golden Globe — smaller, more self-directed, based out of Colorado rather than Los Angeles. He has been doing this for more than 45 years, which is longer than most people who started as adults.

06Summary

Ricky Schroder’s story isn’t a cautionary tale and it isn’t a comeback. It’s something less common: a child star who simply kept working, changed his name to make it possible, and then spent his forties and fifties making the things he wanted to make.

The kid in the penthouse with the go-kart turned out to be a working filmmaker with a ranch and a long marriage behind him and a new one ahead. Not the ending anyone writes for a former child star — which is probably why it’s worth telling.