Mara Wilson, a child actor who played the inquisitive little girl in family favorites like Mrs. Doubtfire and Miracle and 34th Street, captured the hearts of the globe in the early 1990s.
As she grew older, the youthful star—who turned 37 on July 24—ceased being “cute” and vanished from the big screen, despite appearing to be headed for success.
She claims that “Hollywood burned out on me” and that “you are worthless if you are no longer cute or beautiful.”
When five-year-old Mara Wilson played Robin Williams’ youngest kid in Mrs. Doubtfire in 1993, she won over millions of fans.
When the California native was asked to star in one of the highest-grossing comedies in Hollywood history, she had already made appearances in advertisements.
Despite their pride, my parents helped me stay grounded. When I would say something like, “I’m the greatest!” my mother would correct me, saying that I was only an actor. Wilson, who is currently 37, remarked, “You’re just a kid.”
She won the part of Susan Walker in 1994’s Miracle on 34th Street, which Natalie Wood had played in 1947, following her big-screen debut.
“I read my lines for the production team and told them I didn’t believe in Santa Claus,” Wilson writes about her audition in an essay for the Guardian. “But I did believe in the tooth fairy and had named mine after Sally Field,” she adds, referring to the Oscar-winning performer who portrayed her mother in Mrs. Doubtfire.
“The most unhappy”
Wilson then portrayed the enchanted girl in the 1996 film Matilda, costarring with Danny DeVito and his real-life spouse, Rhea Perlman.
Additionally, her mother Suzie lost her fight with breast cancer in the same year.
“I wasn’t entirely sure who I was.Before that, I was someone else, and after that, I was someone else. Wilson describes the intense pain she had through after losing her mother as follows: “She was like this omnipresent thing in my life.””I found it kind of overwhelming,” she continues. I mostly just wanted to be a typical child, especially when my mother passed away.
The young girl was worn out and claims that she was “the most unhappy” when she was “very famous.”
She reluctantly played her final significant role in the 2000 fantasy adventure movie Thomas and the Magic Railroad when she was eleven years old. “They were too youthful personalities. I reacted viscerally to [the] script when I was eleven.I thought, ugh. She told the Guardian, “How adorable.”
“Burnt out”
Her decision to leave Hollywood wasn’t the only one, though.
Wilson was a young adolescent going through puberty and outgrowing the “cute,” so the roles weren’t coming in.
Her bra strap was always visible, and she was described as “just another weird, nerdy, loud girl with bad teeth and bad hair.”
“When I was 13, nobody had referred to me as cute or complimented my appearance in years, at least not in a good way,” she claims.
Wilson had to cope with the demands of celebrity and the difficulties of growing up in the spotlight. She was profoundly impacted by her evolving persona.
“I had this Hollywood notion that you are worthless if you are no longer cute or attractive. Because I directly linked that to my career’s downfall. It doesn’t feel nice to be rejected, even if I was kind of burned out on it and Hollywood was burned out on me.
Mara as the author
Wilson, who is currently a writer, wrote her debut book, “Where Am I Now? In 2016, the book “True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame” was published.
These articles trace her journey from accidental celebrity to relative (but contented) obscurity, covering “everything from what she learned about sex on the set of Melrose Place, to discovering in adolescence that she was no longer ‘cute’ enough for Hollywood.”
She also penned a memoir titled “Good Girls Don’t,” which explores her experiences living up to expectations as a child performer.
