Child Actors Who Became Famous In Different Career Fields

Some child actors grow up to become famous Hollywood stars, while others choose to step out of the spotlight entirely and take on normal jobs, living with relative anonymity. However, there are those who remain in or re-enter the world of celebrity in an entirely different field.

The people on this list all ended up finding varying degrees of fame outside of their initial medium. Several of these former child stars went on to become so famous in their adult careers that their childhood activities have now become footnotes. Others, in contrast, were so famous as children that they tend to get remembered as their younger selves, regardless of how fascinating their subsequent careers turned out to be.

Not all of these celebs completely abandoned acting in adulthood, but the ones who did continue to act are no longer thought of primarily as "actors," but rather as writers, directors, musicians, or whatever else they picked as their primary long-term career focus. So, without further ado, here's a list of former child actors who went on to make it in entirely different fields.

Born in 1928 and first appearing in movie musicals at the age of three, Shirley Temple was the biggest child star of the 1930s — from 1935 to 1938, she was the single biggest box office draw of any age. President Franklin D. Roosevelt praised her movies as pick-me-ups amidst the Great Depression, saying, "When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles."

Retiring from Hollywood in 1950 at the age of 22, Shirley Temple's adult career moved away from movie stardom and into politics. After a failed congressional run in 1967, she was appointed as a delegate to the United Nations in 1969 thanks to Henry Kissinger being impressed with her knowledge of global politics. President Gerald Ford appointed her to be the United States Ambassador to Ghana and the first female Chief of Protocol in the State Department. Under the presidency of Ronald Reagan (with whom she co-starred in the 1947 flop "That Hagen Girl"), she worked as a foreign affairs officer-expert for the Department of State.

Temple later served as the US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia under George H. W. Bush's presidency — being the second-to-last person to fill that role before Czechoslovakia split into two countries in 1992. She passed away in 2014 at age 85 from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Credited as Ronny Howard in his childhood roles, Ron Howard got into acting thanks to his parents, Rance Howard and Jean Speagle Howard, being actors. Howard got his big break at just five years old when he was cast as Opie Taylor on "The Andy Griffith Show," which ran for eight seasons from 1960-1968. He also appeared in films like "The Music Man" and "American Graffiti," and he remained a regular TV presence throughout his twenties, playing Richie Cunningham in the hit sitcom "Happy Days."

Today, Ron Howard is best known for his work as a director. He's worked on all sorts of movies, from "Splash" to "Solo: A Star Wars Story," but he's most acclaimed for his historical dramas. 1995's "Apollo 13" earned him a Director's Guild of America Award, for example, and 2001's "A Beautiful Mind" won him a second DGA prize as well as the Academy Awards for best picture and best director.

Between the straight-laced characters he played as a child actor and his positive reputation on set as a director, he's widely viewed as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. When he appears in front of the camera these days, he's usually playing himself with self-deprecating humor on sitcoms such as "Arrested Development" (which he also narrated and produced) and "Only Murders in the Building."

In the '90s, a young Mara Wilson starred in films such as "Mrs. Doubtfire," "Miracle on 34th Street," and "Matilda." Though she was talented as a child actor, she didn't much enjoy the job, and so she retired from the business at 13 years old in 2000 following the failure of "Thomas and the Magic Railroad." As she explained on her blog in 2012, "Film can be exciting, but more often, it's tedious. The celebrity aspect is nothing short of ridiculous, and auditioning is brutal and dehumanizing." Through her blogs, editorials, memoirs, and social media posts, Wilson has written at length about her experiences as a child actor, both positive and negative.

What has Mara Wilson been doing since then? She's now a writer. She wrote a play called "Sheeple," which played at the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival. And, despite her falling out with live-action film acting, she continues to enjoy voice acting. Her voice can be heard in cartoons like "BoJack Horseman" and "Big Hero 6: The Series," as well as podcasts like "Welcome to Night Vale" and "Love is a Crime." She's also a narrator who has worked on several audiobooks. "Somebody said once that it's really funny and seems fitting that Matilda grew up to be an audiobook narrator," Wilson told AudioFile magazine, adding that one of her earliest memories is of her mother narrating Matilda, acting out all of the characters.

Richard William "Wil" Wheaton was never going to escape being associated with his divisive role as kid genius Wesley Crusher from "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Instead, he's leaned into the association, parlaying his early connection to the "Star Trek" universe into a generalized sort of geek celebrity. He still continues to act, but mostly he plays himself — whether as a parody of himself in things like "The Big Bang Theory" or as a presenter and host in series like SyFy's "The Wil Wheaton Project" and Paramount+'s "Star Trek" after-show "The Ready Room."

Following a somewhat similar path to Mara Wilson, Wheaton maintains a significant online presence, has written multiple memoirs, and has found a lot of success as a voice actor, podcaster (including appearances on "Welcome to Night Vale"), and an audiobook narrator, usually specializing in science fiction authors like John Scalzi and Ernest Cline. He's also been active as a progressive voice in video game and tabletop RPG spaces, and is a regular presence on the pop culture convention circuit. 

Many of the biggest names in the right wing media ecosystem are people who initially tried to build careers in more traditional media and failed. Before he was asking college students to "change his mind" on the "Louder with Crowder" podcast, Steven Crowder was a child actor best known for voicing the anthropomorphic bear Alan "The Brain" Powers in Season 5 and Season 6 of the PBS Kids cartoon "Arthur." (The Brain's family were confirmed as being of Senegalese descent in the show, so make of Crowder's casting what you will).

After his time on "Arthur," Crowder had minor parts in films like "3 Needles," "The Covenant," and "The Secret," and he also appeared in a single episode of the ABC Family comedy-drama series "Greek." He attempted to break into stand-up comedy at one stage, and when that didn't work out, he decided to put the conservative political material he'd been advised to cut from his stand-up act into YouTube videos, instead. From there, he got the attention of PJ Media and then Fox News, entering conservative punditry full-time in 2009 before establishing his own podcast in 2015.

When Steven Crowder outgrew the role of The Brain on "Arthur," he was replaced by another white kid: Alex Hood, who ended up going down the opposite path, politically speaking. Hood, who came out as a transgender woman in 2024, is today best known as a cartoonist under the nom de plume Haus of Decline. Her cartoons involving absurdist phallic sexuality, leftist political satire, and pop culture parodies like "Steven Universe vs. Hitler" have frequently gone viral on social media.

Hood's foray into acting as a child also included voicing Kenny in the English dub of "Beyblade" and playing Ron Yuma in the Canadian teen dramedy "Naturally, Sadie." She started the Haus of Decline Twitter account and podcast with her friend Stephen in 2020 and began regularly publishing her comics in 2021 while facing depression and unemployment. Hood also makes music: She's posted some songs on Soundcloud over the past few years and released her debut rock record, titled "Psychogeography," on Bandcamp under the artist name Anti-Spectacular in 2024.

Aubrey Drake Graham landed the role of James "Jimmy" Brooks — a promising basketball player who later gets paralyzed in a school shooting — on the Canadian teen drama "Degrassi: The Next Generation" when he was 14 years old. For Americans who weren't watching "Degrassi," it's easy to forget that the highest-certified digital singles artist by some distance (he's shifted 244 million units, with Rihanna way behind in second place at 184 million at the time of this writing) started off as a child actor.

As he started to build his rap career, he worried that Jimmy using a wheelchair would make him appear weak, but was persuaded by writer James Hurst that the character's arc was important for representation. "He's like, 'All my friends in the rap game say I'm soft because I'm in a wheelchair.' And I said, 'Well, tell your friends in the rap game that you got shot. How much harder can you get? You got shot, and you're in a wheelchair.' He was like, 'Yeah, yeah.' He was so nice and apologetic about everything," Hurst told AV Club. Drake made his last appearance on the show in 2008. He released his first full album, "Thank Me Later," in 2010, and he never looked back.

Not every young Disney star has gone on to enjoy a major career, but "The All-New Mickey Mouse Club" had a brilliant track record when it came to discovering the next big celebrities, particularly in its last two seasons. Britney Spears is one of three former cast members from "The All-New Mickey Mouse Club" Season 6 and Season 7 cast included on this list, and that's not even close to all the talent that this show unearthed (other Mouseketeers who would go on to be stars include actors Ryan Gosling and Keri Russell).

A few years after her time on the Disney Channel ended, a 15-year-old Spears signed with Jive Records. With the runaway success of her first two albums, "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops!... I Did It Again," she became the best-selling teenage artist of all time, selling 37 million records before turning 20. Such extreme fame came with equally extreme media scrutiny and personal struggles.

Spears was placed under her father's conservatorship in 2008, allegedly due to mental health issues. She successfully got the conservatorship terminated in 2021, thanks in part to the fan-led #FreeBritney campaign. Her best-selling 2023 tell-all memoir "The Woman in Me" received a record-breaking $15 million deal from Simon & Schuster and went on to sell over two million copies in the United States alone.

Britney Spears' popularity at the turn of the millennium prompted every record executive to seek out their own teen pop idols, so why not turn to one of Spears' "The All-New Mickey Mouse Club" co-stars? Christina Aguilera signed with RCA Records after she proved that she had pipes with "Reflection," the theme song to Disney's animated film "Mulan." Her single "Genie in a Bottle" topped the Billboard charts in 1999 and she emerged as a challenger to Spears' teen pop queen status, creating a rivalry (though the truth about the feud between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera is that was part media hype, part competitiveness dating back to their Disney Channel days, and part a response to pressure from the industry).

Aguilera has adopted various alter-egos over the years, like the provocative Xtina and the Old Hollywood-inspired Baby Jane. She had several major hits throughout the 2000s, including "Beautiful" and "Ain't No Other Man," but the 2010s were not as fruitful for her. She went on to become known for her role as a coach on the singing reality competition television series "The Voice," though she left in 2016 after becoming frustrated with the show. "It became something that I didn't feel was what I had signed up for in Season 1," she told Billboard magazine. "You realize it's not about music. It's about making good TV moments and massaging a story."

Yet another Mouseketeer who went on to make it as a musician, Justin Timberlake became a world-renowned pop star after his time on "The All-New Mickey Mouse Club" came to an end. He rose to fame as a member of *NSYNC and ended up launching a solo career that would eclipse his time in the boy band. During an appearance on The Ellen Show, Timberland revealed that he actually lived with fellow Mouseketeer Ryan Gosling when they were both just 11 years old. "His mother had to keep her job in Canada the second year that we were on the television show and my mom was his guardian for like six months," he said.

Timberlake continued to act into adulthood, most notably playing Napster founder Sean Parker in "The Social Network" and voicing Branch in the "Trolls" movies. But when people think about Timberlake, they primarily think about his music career — how he brought sexy back and caused massive controversy in his 2004 Super Bowl halftime show with Janet Jackson. His best selling album, 2002's "Justified," sold over 10 million copies worldwide, and he continues to make music, with his sixth studio album "Everything I Thought It Was" dropping in 2024.

Unlike many others on this list, Alanis Morissette didn't become famous as a child actress, though she did get her start on TV. When she was 11 years old, she appeared in a handful of episodes of "You Can't Do That on Television!," the Canadian kids sketch comedy that became Nickelodeon's first big hit and introduced the network's iconic green slime. The first of her five episodes was music-themed, and it became apparent to everyone on set that the Ottawa native was destined to make the move from acting to singing — according to The Hollywood Reporter, Morissette "impressed castmates by playing her demo tape."

Morissette's first two albums didn't generate much buzz outside of Canada, but she went alt-rock for her third album, "Jagged Little Pill," and it changed everything for her. Released in 1995, it became a critically-acclaimed bestseller — at 21, she was the youngest artist to go platinum until Britney Spears' debut — which later inspired a jukebox musical that played on Broadway. She's been a lot more focused on music than acting over the years, though she's still had a few notable roles, including playing God in Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse and playing an imaginary friend version of herself in the cartoon "The Great North."

Did you know that Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett of the band Rilo Kiley both started out as child actors? Lewis played a number of small parts in movies, TV shows, and commercials in the '80s and '90s, with noteworthy credits including Haley in "The Wizard" and Hannah Nefler in "Troop Beverly Hills." Sennett started acting a bit later as a teenager, making his TV debut (credited as Blake Soper) in 1987 in an episode of "Highway to Heaven" and getting some bigger roles in the early '90s, such as Noah Lambert in "His & Hers" and Ronnie Pinsky in "Salute Your Shorts." He also joined the cast of "Boy Meets World" as Joseph "Joey the Rat" Epstein, appearing in 16 episodes between 1994 and 1996.

Sharing both a background in acting and a passion for music, Lewis and Sennett formed the indie rock band Rilo Kiley alongside friends Pierre De Reeder and Dave Rock in 1998 and began dating. Their romantic relationship ended in 2003 — "I suppose it's a bad idea to have your business partner and your musical collaborator and your best friend and your lover be the same person," Sennett told Spin. Sennett left the band in 2007, and Rilo Kiley officially disbanded in 2011. Lewis, who also did back-up singing for The Postal Service, has released five solo albums. Sennett formed other bands including The Elected and Night Terrors of 1927