When I was seven, my family spent a week in Japan to promote the remake of Miracle On 34th Street. Wit hin three days, I was ready to become an expatriate.
“This is so much better than the United States!” I told my mother as we walked back to the hotel with brand new kimonos. I bowed my head to the people we passed. A Japanese businessman smiled at me and bowed back.
“See?” I said. “Everyone likes us.”
They liked me, anyway. Our translator, Kuni, had told me as much. When Miracle was screened at Tokyo Stadium, I had gone out to introduce it. “Do you hear what they’re saying?” Kuni said after I walked off the field.
“Kawaii,” she said, smiling. “She’s so cute!”
It hadn’t occurred to me that I was cute. My family told me I was beautiful, but I had never been one of the prettier girls in my class. The pretty girls were a different breed. It was probably as much of a shock to them as it was to me when I was cast in a movie, but at that time, casting directors wanted kids who looked “normal”. As long as we could memorise our lines and say them with some feeling, no-one cared how symmetrical our faces were. And it had worked: I had tricked entire countries into thinking I was cute.
John Hughes had been assigned to write the script of the Miracle remake, and the part of Susan, the young girl played by Natalie Wood in the original, had been rewritten as a boy named Jonathan. Christopher Columbus, who directed Mrs Doubtfire, my first film, must have put in a good word for me, because the script ended up in my mother’s hands. I liked Jonathan/Susan right away; she seemed smart. A few days later I read my lines for the production team and told them I didn’t believe in Santa Claus, but I did believe in the tooth fairy and had named mine after Sally Field. They laughed, thanked me for my audition, and within a few weeks had changed Jonathan back to Susan. I had the part.
My mother hadn’t pushed me into acting. We lived in Burbank, 20 minutes from Hollywood, and lots of people I knew were involved in the industry in one way or another — including my father, who worked as an electronics engineer at CBS and NBC, and my older brother Danny, who had been in a few commercials. I begged my mother to let me do the same, and before we knew it, I was cast in Mrs Doubtfire. 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.”
Both my mother and I liked John Hughes right away. He didn’t talk down to me, and he was from the same suburb of Chicago as my mother. But once we started filming, I could tell she had doubts about the remake. John didn’t have much say any more: once a film is in production, the script no longer belongs to the screenwriter. Script changes were mostly left to our director, who didn’t have much professional experience. My mother’s instinct was not to interfere, but it had always been hard for her to keep her opinions to herself.
“Are you sure you want Mara to say ‘uncharacteristically’?” she asked him after a rewrite. “She’s still getting over her lisp.” Of course he wanted me to. It was adorable to make a six?year?old with a speech impediment say an eight?syllable word.
As the months went on, my mother went from furtively asking, “Are you sure?” to demanding to know why a change was being made.
“Why is she wearing a hair ribbon to bed?” “Well, you know,” he would say. “It’s cute.”
I could sense her disappointment. They were making Susan as cute as possible, and taking away her intelligence and complexity.
All through the last few months of Miracle and our publicity tour, my mother smiled whenever people told her I was cute, but I could sense she was forcing it: she didn’t care for cuteness, and her disapproval was contagious. After that, anytime someone said it, I would wince. Something about it made me feel smaller.
Apparently the film version of me was polarising. Some outlets loved me: Entertainment Tonight, the TV show, asked me back again and again. Others weren’t feeling it. One woman at a film magazine I’ll call Entertainment Twice-a?Fortnight was particularly brutal, referring to me as “Mara Wilson, who lisped her way over?fetchingly through Mrs Doubtfire and continues the tiresome act here.” She devoted an article to “the risks of being too cute as a child actor”, but rather than complain about directors and producers who treated children like dolls, she reserved her ire for me. When she saw me smile, all she wanted was — and these are her own words — “to shake her by her tiny adorable shoulders until her little Chiclet teeth rattle”. In some ways, it couldn’t be helped. It was still the early 90s. Grunge and nihilism were in. What better way to show one’s edge than hypothetical child abuse?
By the time I started filming Matilda the next year, I couldn’t wait to get older. When Kiami Davael, who played Matilda’s best friend, Lavender, turned nine while we were filming, she had been allowed to work for another hour a day. I couldn’t wait to work nine hours a day. But that wasn’t all: I wanted the freedom my teenage brothers had, to do all the cool things they did, like driving and going to concerts without a chaperone. Most of all I wanted people to stop thinking I was younger than I was.
Soon after Matilda wrapped, I lost my mother to cancer, 13 months after she was diagnosed. My father became so overprotective he wouldn’t even let me cross the street by myself.
For a few years after that, I ended up passing on most of the scripts that came my way. The characters were too young.
At 16, I expected I would go back to acting at some point. Thinking about life without it made me anxious. But I knew by then that if I wanted to be in film, I had to be beautiful. It would happen, I was sure. For now, I was a teenager and I was allowed to be awkward. A lot of child actors reappeared after puberty, like butterflies from cocoons, fresh?faced and ready for Neutrogena ads.
Then I opened a magazine and saw a familiar face. A few years earlier, I had met a friendly 12?year?old girl with red hair called Scarlett at a press conference on child acting. When a reporter asked if any of us had trouble with the kids at school, she’d said she had been teased so badly she had transferred to a special school for child actors. She had done much better and made lots of friends.
After the press conference, I tried to talk to Scarlett more. I wanted to ask her what had happened at her school, and how I would know if I should transfer. Instead, I watched her pull a balloon off a display, suck in the helium, and sing, “We’re the Chipmunks! C?H?I?P?M?U?N?K?S!” It made me like her more.
But the magazine spread was the first I’d seen of her since. There was Scarlett, looking beautiful, talking about her role in a film with Bill Murray, and she was most definitely a woman. She was in grownup movies now, being sexy. How had she done it?
There was a sinking feeling in my stomach. Scarlett was only two or three years older than me. There was no way I was going to become even half as beautiful as she was in that time. Even with my braces off, with contact lenses and a better haircut, I was always going to look the way I did. I knew I wasn’t a gorgon, but I guessed that if 10 strangers were to look at a photo of me, probably about four or five of them would find me attractive. That would not be good enough for Hollywood, where an actress had to be attractive to eight out of 10 people to be considered for even the homely best friend character.
I did a “where are they now?” interview for an entertainment TV show, but they never aired it because they said I looked “too pale”. I’d pass newsstands on my way to class, wearing pyjamas, and see my former friends and peers — Hilary Duff, Scarlett Johansson and, inevitably, Kristen Stewart — on magazine covers, looking immaculate.
I didn’t know what I wanted, but whatever it was, I wanted it to be my choice. I didn’t want to stop acting because I was too ugly.
Once I contacted the author of a list of Ugliest Former Child Actors to ask her why, as a woman, she was punishing other women for the way they looked. She wrote back immediately to apologise. “I write stupid things on the internet to pay the bills,” she said. “I can’t afford integrity.”
I understand that celebrities have a contract with the public: they get to be the target of jealousy and criticism, and sometimes admiration, in exchange for money and recognition. But I let that contract run out a while ago. It is not my job to be pretty, or cute, or anything that someone else wants me to be. So the next time someone hiding behind a username decides to tell me what would make me prettier, I’m going to propose the following: I will meet them in person and ask them to listen. I will tell them about going through puberty in the public eye after my mother died of cancer. I will tell them how it feels to find a website advertising nude photos of yourself as a 12?year?old. I will tell them I’ve looked at “cute” from both sides now, and in both cases it just made me miserable. — Guardian (Excerpts from Where Am I Now: True Stories Of Girlhood And Accidental Fame by Mara Wilson)