n the early 1990s, everyone loved Mara Wilson, the child actor who was famous for roles in family movies like Mrs. Doubtfire and Miracle on 34th Street.
Mara Wilson, who turned 37 on July 24, seemed like she was on her way to great success. But as she grew up and stopped being seen as “cute,” she disappeared from the big screen.
She says, “Hollywood was burned out on me. If you’re not cute anymore, if you’re not beautiful, then you are worthless.”
Keep reading to find out what happened to Mara Wilson!
In 1993, when she was just five years old, Mara Wilson won the hearts of many people with her role as Robin Williams’ youngest child in Mrs. Doubtfire.
Before that, the California-born star had appeared in commercials. Her big break came when she was cast in one of the biggest comedy hits in Hollywood.
Mara Wilson, now 37, said, “My parents were proud of me, but they kept me grounded. If I ever got too full of myself and said something like, ‘I’m the greatest!’ my mother would remind me, ‘You’re just an actor. You’re just a kid.’”
After her big break, she got the role of Susan Walker in the 1994 movie Miracle on 34th Street. This was the same role that Natalie Wood played in the 1947 version.
In an essay for The Guardian, Wilson talked about her audition for Miracle on 34th Street. She read her lines for the production team and mentioned that she didn’t believe in Santa Claus, but she did believe in the tooth fairy and had named hers after Sally Field, who played her mom in Mrs. Doubtfire.
Wilson’s next big role was as the magical girl in Matilda (1996), where she starred alongside Danny DeVito and his real-life wife, Rhea Perlman.
In the same year that Mara Wilson starred in Matilda, her mother, Suzie, passed away from breast cancer.
Wilson says, “I didn’t really know who I was… There was who I was before that, and who I was after. She was like this big part of my life.” She found the grief overwhelming and adds, “Most of the time, I just wanted to be a normal kid, especially after my mother died.”
Even though she was very famous, Wilson felt very unhappy and exhausted.
When Mara Wilson was 11, she took on her last big role in the 2000 film Thomas and the Magic Railroad. She says, “The characters seemed too young for me. At 11, I thought the script was just too cute.”
But leaving Hollywood wasn’t just her choice.
As a teenager, Wilson struggled to find roles as she grew up and lost the “cute” image. She describes herself as “just another weird, nerdy, loud girl with bad teeth and bad hair,” and no one was calling her cute anymore.
Wilson says, “At 13, no one had said anything nice about the way I looked in years.”
She faced the pressures of fame and the challenges of growing up in the public eye. Her changing image affected her deeply. She felt that if she wasn’t cute or beautiful, she was worthless, which made her feel rejected and burned out.
Now, Mara Wilson is a writer. In 2016, she published her first book, Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame. The book talks about her experiences, including what she learned about sex on the set of Melrose Place and how she felt she wasn’t “cute” enough for Hollywood anymore.
She also wrote a memoir called Good Girls Don’t, which looks at her life as a child actor and the expectations she faced.
Wilson reflects, “Being cute just made me miserable. I always thought it would be me quitting acting, not the other way around.”
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