Mara Wilson, the charming child actor who played the inquisitive little girl in Mrs. Doubtfire and Miracle on 34th Street, became famous in the early 1990s.
The youthful star, who turned 37 on July 24, seemed promising, but she stopped being “cute” and disappeared from film.
“Hollywood was burned out on me,” she recalls. “If you’re not cute anymore, if you’re not beautiful, then you are worthless.”
What happened to Wilson? Read on!
In 1993, five-year-old Mara Wilson played Robin Williams’ youngest kid in Mrs. Doubtfire, winning over millions of fans.
The California native has performed in advertisements before being cast in one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing comedies.
Though proud, my parents disciplined me. If I said, ‘I’m the greatest!’ my mother would say, ‘You’re just an actor. “You’re just a kid,” remarked Wilson, 37.
In Miracle on 34th Street, she played Susan Walker, Natalie Wood’s 1947 role, after her film debut.
Wilson wrote in the Guardian that she auditioned by “reading my lines for the production team and telling them I didn’t believe in Santa Claus.” She says, “but I did believe in the tooth fairy and had named mine after Sally Field,” referring to the Oscar-winning actress who played her mother in Mrs. Doubtfire.
“Most unhappy”
Next, Wilson starred with Danny DeVito and his wife Rhea Perlman in Matilda (1996) as the magical girl.
In the same year, her mother Suzie died of breast cancer.
“I wasn’t sure who I was…”Two sides of me existed before and after. Wilson describes her grief after losing her mother as “she was like this omnipresent thing in my life.” She says, “It was overwhelming. I mostly wanted to be a regular kid after my mother died.”
After becoming “very famous,” the little girl was fatigued and “was the most unhappy.”
The 2000 fantasy adventure film Thomas and the Magic Railroad was her last major role, which she reluctantly played at 11. The characters were too young. I had a strong reaction to the screenplay at age 11.Ugh, thinking. So cute, she tells the Guardian.
Burned out
But leaving Hollywood wasn’t her only choice.
Puberty and outgrowing the “cute” prevented Wilson from getting opportunities as an adolescent.
She was “just another weird, nerdy, loud girl with bad teeth and bad hair, whose bra strap was always showing.”
“At 13, no one had called me cute or mentioned the way I looked in years, at least not positively,” she adds.
Wilson faced stardom and the trials of maturity in the public glare. She was deeply affected by her image change.
“I had this Hollywood idea that if you’re not cute or beautiful, you’re worthless. Because I linked that to my career’s end. Even if I was burned out and Hollywood was burned out on me, rejection still hurts.
Wilson wrote her debut book, “Where Am I Now?” True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame,” 2016.
The book covers “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, these essays chart her journey from accidental fame to relative (but happy) obscurity.”
Her novel “Good Girls Don’t” recounts her upbringing as a child performer meeting expectations.
“Being cute just made me miserable,” she says in her Guardian column. “I always thought I would quit acting, not the other way around.”
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