Mara Wilson was only five when she starred in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Before she starred in the movie, Wilson appeared in some commercials.
“My parents were proud, but they kept me grounded. If I ever said something like, ‘I’m the greatest!’ my mother would remind me, ‘You’re just an actor. You’re just a kid,’” Wilson shared.
Wilson shared her audition as, “I read my lines for the production team and told them I didn’t believe in Santa Claus.” Then she referred her character’s mother as, “but I did believe in the tooth fairy and had named mine after Sally Field.”
The siblings from ‘MRS DOUBTFIRE’ have reunited over 30 years after the film’s release. pic.twitter.com/igfg92AlN9
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) May 2, 2024
Later, Wilson starred in Matilda, along with Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. Sadly, in that year, 1996, Wilson lost her mother, who were battling against breast cancer.
“I didn’t really know who I was…There was who I was before that, and who I was after that. She was like this omnipresent thing in my life,” Wilson shared. “I found it kind of overwhelming. Most of the time, I just wanted to be a normal kid, especially after my mother died.”
Wilson revealed that when she was the most famous version of herself, she was the most unhappy version also.
In 2000, Wilson starred in “Thomas and the Magic Railroad,” when she was 11. “The characters were too young. At 11, I had a visceral reaction to [the] script…Ugh, I thought. How cute,” Wilson said.
But her retirement from Hollywood was not only up to her. She was in her teen years, and puberty hit her. She was not that same cute little girl anymore. As she described, 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 in a positive way,” Wilson said.
“I had this Hollywood idea that if you’re not cute anymore, if you’re not beautiful, then you are worthless. Because I directly tied that to the demise of my career. Even though I was sort of burned out on it, and Hollywood was burned out on me, it still doesn’t feel good to be rejected.”
Backstage at @OkaytoSayTX supporting #mentalhealth awareness and destigmatization! pic.twitter.com/IqfFkuRiPj
— Mara Wilson (@MaraWilson) March 8, 2018
Wilson become a writer afterwards as she changed her career. She published her first book in 2016, “Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame.”
In her book, according to Wilson, she is talking about, “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.”
Having a rad time at #90sCon! pic.twitter.com/WMEEPpIBRr
— Mara Wilson (@MaraWilson) March 11, 2022
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