In the early 1990s, the world fell in love with the adorable Mara Wilson, the child actor known for playing the precocious little girl in family classics like Mrs. Doubtfire and Miracle on 34th Street.
The young star, who turned 37 on July 24, seemed poised for success but as she grew older, she stopped being “cute” and disappeared from the big screen.
“Hollywood was burned out on me,” she says, adding that “if you’re not cute anymore, if you’re not beautiful, then you are worthless.
In 1993, five-year-old Mara Wilson stole the hearts of millions of fans when she starred as Robin Williams’ youngest child in Mrs. Doubtfire.
The California-born star had previously appeared in commercials when she received the invitation to star in one of the biggest-grossing comedies in Hollywood history.
“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, now 37, said.
After her big screen debut, she won the role of Susan Walker – the same role played by Natalie Wood in 1947 – in 1994’s Miracle on 34th Street.
In an essay for the Guardian, Wilson writes of her audition, “I read my lines for the production team and told them I didn’t believe in Santa Claus.” Referencing the Oscar-winning actor who played her mom in Mrs. Doubtfire, she continues, “but I did believe in the tooth fairy and had named mine after Sally Field.”
‘Most unhappy’
Next, Wilson played the magical girl in 1996’s Matilda, starring alongside Danny DeVito and his real-life wife Rhea Perlman.
It was also the same year her mother, Suzie, lost her battle with 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 says of the deep grief she experienced after losing her mother. She adds, “I found it kind of overwhelming. Most of the time, I just wanted to be a normal kid, especially after my mother died.”
The young girl was exhausted and when she was “very famous,” she says she “was the most unhappy.”
When she was 11, she begrudgingly played her last major role in the 2000 fantasy adventure film Thomas and the Magic Railroad. “The characters were too young. At 11, I had a visceral reaction to [the] script…Ugh, I thought. How cute,” she tells the Guardian.
‘Burned out’
But her exit from Hollywood wasn’t only her decision.
As a young teenager, the roles weren’t coming in for Wilson, who was going through puberty and outgrowing the “cute.”
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,” she says.
Wilson was forced to deal with the pressures of fame and the challenges of transitioning to adulthood in the public eye. Her changing image had a profound effect on her.
“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.”
Mara as the writer
Wilson, now a writer, authored her first book “Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame,” in 2016.
The book discusses “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.”
She also wrote “Good Girls Don’t” a memoir that examines her life as a child actor living up to expectations.
“Being cute just made me miserable,” she writes in her essay for the Guardian. “I had always thought it would be me giving up acting, not the other way around.”
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Miranda Lambеrt оn hоw shе rеaIIу fееIs abоut Gwеn Stеfani
One thing the world was sure of was that Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton were going to last. But as we all know, that’s not how things ended between the couple who once gave the world of country music stomach butterflies.While still married to Lambert, Shelton met singer Gwen Stefani on The Voice in 2014. At the time, Stefani was also with someone else, but a photo of the two taken in November 2014 made many believe that there was something more than a friendship between them.The rumors turned out to be true when both Shelton and Stefani ended their respective marriages. By November 2015, they were official, and everyone saw them as the new powerful music couple.
On top of that, it was reported that the relationship between Shelton and Stefani didn’t come as a surprise to Lambert, according to E!, because the two “they “…were always pretty flirty. Miranda and Blake were on the rocks on and off and knew that this could always be a possibility.”
Another source shared with Us Weekly that Lambert had “had her suspicions,” but she didn’t have hard feelings towards Stefani at the time.
Back in July 2018, Lambert recalled hanging up the phone to a reporter to asked her about her feelings towards Stefani.
“… I got on the phone for the first interview. First question was, ‘How do you feel about Gwen [Stefani]?’” Lambert explained. “I hung up. I told [manager] Marion [Kraft], I just can’t do this.” She continued: “What was in the music was real, and I wanted people to get it from that. Take from it what they would. Then if I needed to talk, I would.”
However, despite the fact that Shelton seemed to move on pretty quickly after his divorce with Lambert, she has never commented her ex’s new relationship and she has never gotten into a feud with Stefani.
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