In the 90s, the world fell in love with the charming Mara Wilson, the child actress known for her role as the bright young girl in family classics like Mrs. Doubtfire and Miracle on 34th Street.
The young star, who turned 37 on July 24, seemed destined for success, but as she grew up, she was no longer considered “cute” and faded from the big screen.
“Hollywood was tired of me,” she says, adding that “if you’re no longer cute, if you’re no longer beautiful, then you’re useless.”
Keep reading to find out what happened to Wilson!
In 1993, five-year-old Mara Wilson won the hearts of millions of fans when she played the youngest daughter of Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire.
The California-born actress had previously worked in commercials when she received the invitation to join one of the most successful comedies in Hollywood history.
My parents were proud, but they kept me grounded. If I ever said something like ‘I’m the best!’, my mom would remind me: ‘You’re just an actress. You’re just a kid,'” said Wilson, now 37.
After her film debut, she landed the role of Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street in 1994 — the same role Natalie Wood played in 1947.
In an essay for The Guardian, Wilson writes about her audition: “I read my lines for the production team and told them I didn’t believe in Santa Claus.” Referring to the Oscar-winning actress who played her mother in Mrs. Doubtfire, she adds: “But I did believe in the Tooth Fairy and had named her Sally Field.”
“The most unhappy”
Next, Wilson starred as the magical girl in Matilda in 1996, where she acted alongside Danny DeVito and his wife Rhea Perlman.
It was also the same year that her mother, Suzie, lost her battle with breast cancer.
“I didn’t really know who I was… There was a ‘me’ before that event and a ‘me’ after. She was like an omnipresent presence in my life,” Wilson says about the profound sadness she felt after her mother’s loss. She adds, “I found it quite overwhelming. Most of the time, I just wanted to be a normal kid, especially after my mother died.”
The young actress was exhausted, and when she was “very famous,” she felt “more unhappy.
Mara Wilson as Susan Walker in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street.
At 11, she reluctantly took on her last major role in the fantasy and adventure film Thomas and the Magic Railroad in 2000. “The characters were too young. At 11, I had a visceral reaction to the script… Ugh, I thought. How cute,” she tells The Guardian.
“Exhausted”
However, her departure from Hollywood wasn’t solely her decision.
As a teenager, roles stopped coming to Wilson as she went through puberty and moved beyond the “cute” phase.
She was “just another weird, nerdy, noisy girl with ugly teeth and bad hair, whose bra was always…
By the time I was 13, no one had called me cute or commented positively on my appearance for years,” she says.
Wilson was forced to confront the pressures of fame and the challenges of transitioning to adulthood under the public eye. Her changing image had a profound impact on her.
“I had this idea from Hollywood that you’re useless if you’re no longer cute, if you’re no longer beautiful. Because I associated that directly with the end of my career. Even though I was a bit tired of it and Hollywood was tired of me too, it still doesn’t feel good to be rejected.”
Mara as a Writer
Wilson, now a writer, published her first book, Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame, in 2016.
The book covers “everything from what she learned about sex on the set of Melrose Place, to the discovery in her teenage years that she was no longer ‘cute’ enough for Hollywood. These essays describe her journey from accidental fame to a relatively (but happily) obscured life.
She also wrote Good Girls Don’t, a memoir that examines her life as a child actress and the pressures of meeting expectations.
“Being born cute just made me unhappy,” she writes in her essay for The Guardian. “I had always thought it would be me leaving acting, not the other way around.”
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