Some celebrities achieve fame after many years of striving, whereas others find themselves the talk of the town overnight. Regardless of how they get to the top, many realize it’s not for everyone.
Here are 21 celebrities who had it all, but they chose to walk away from fame:
1.
In the ’90s, Bridget Fonda starred in movies like Single White Female, Lake Placid, and Jackie Brown. However, according to the Independent, she retired from acting in 2002. She had actually signed on to a recurring role on The Practice in 2003, but after “miraculously” surviving a car accident a few weeks before the series went into production, she was replaced.
In 2023, she reportedly told a paparazzo at an airport that she wouldn’t return to acting because “it’s too nice being a civilian.”
2.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off actor Mia Sara was an ’80s teen star and had success through the ’00s, but she felt uncomfortable in the spotlight. She slowed down in the 2010s and retired after 2013’s Pretty Pretty.
She didn’t plan to act again, but then director Mike Flanagan persuaded her to join the cast of 2024’s The Life of Chuck. In 2025, she told Yahoo Life, “I love Mike Flanagan, like really adore him just as a person, and we are friends, and I’m just a huge fan. When we met [and had dinner], Mike said, ‘Why don’t you work anymore?’ And I said, ‘Oh, it’s really complicated,’ and he said, ‘Would you ever work again? What if I offered you something?’ …[The Life of Chuck] was a really healing experience. Mike creates an incredibly cohesive and really terrific feeling on set. It felt like really nice closure. It did me a world of good.”
In 2019, director Neil Jordan told Yahoo Entertainment, “Very wisely actually, Jaye made one other movie for which he made a ton of money. He then said, ‘Look, this is not for me.’ You know? He went back to his life. He’s a very happy man now. He’s bulked up now. … Different person now. But very healthy and very good.”
4.
Leelee Sobieski was a teen star in the ’90s and ’00s known for her roles in movies like Never Been Kissed and The Glass House. However, she largely retired from acting in 2012, telling Vogue, “Ninety percent of acting roles involve so much sexual stuff with other people, and I don’t want to do that. It’s such a strange fire to play with, and [my] relationship is surely strong enough to handle it, but if you’re going to walk through fire, there has to be something incredible on the other side.”
Then, in 2018, she told AnOther, “A lot of the time when you work, it’s a money project basically. I started paying the rent on our house when I was 15, so I had a lot of pressure and things got complicated for me… So when I could, I stopped. It’s kind of a gross industry – well, they all are, when you examine them – but in acting, you’re selling your appearance so much. I would cry every time I had to kiss somebody; I couldn’t stomach it. I would think, ‘I like this person, so I don’t think they should pay me to kiss them,’ or ‘I don’t like this person, so I don’t want to kiss them. Why is my kiss for sale?’ It made me feel really cheap.”
“It didn’t matter whether people thought it was an admirable thing to do – in my soul I thought, ‘My kiss is not for sale’ – it might have been acting, but it was real for me as it was my first or third kiss, so it was confusing for me. I don’t know why it’s legal for a child to act unless they can sell oranges or whatever legally too. It’s a crazy double standard, and that’s super weird for me. Now that the #MeToo movement has come forward, people understand more that it’s pretty gross and uncomfortable,” she said.
In 2018, she reemerged as an artist under the name Leelee Kimmel. She told Artnet, “I kept working fervently in secret. Painting was always my goal; I just kept getting distracted with work things and paying bills…Actors end up going from one role to another with all this energy behind them, and you just become emptier and emptier and emptier — you end up having no real experiences. To cry, you end up drawing on the experiences of another character you played. I don’t want my children to look at Netflix and see me on screen in the arms of someone who’s not their dad.”
5.
By the time Entourage ended, Adrian Grenier felt overwhelmed by the pace and pressures of Hollywood. So, in 2016, he bought some land outside of Austin and a ’60s camper to live in. Over the next year, he experienced a “dark night of the soul.” He changed and grew as a person and got more invested in environmentalism and entrepreneurship. Eventually, he moved to Texas full-time.
He told Austin Lifestyle, “My land says, ‘You’re welcome’ — I don’t have to fight for it anymore. I do feel totally at peace. My work on the farm is present, immediate, apparent. The work I used to do got created over time; you make something, but you don’t ever know if it will be good. Acting is a dissociative experience where you don’t even know if you’re doing it right — you need a director to tell you! It’s a mask-wearing process — you’re not even you, you’re just playing! So just to be here, to be me, to be rooted, to feel the earth, to dig in the dirt… it’s so grounding. I’d been stepping on concrete my whole life, separated from the earth. Here and now, I feel so much more centered and balanced.”
He continued, “I have been doing environmental work for the last 20 years, I’ve started organizations and run non-profits, all designed to tell people to live more in line with nature — and yet, I wasn’t living that way. In my mind, it was an ideal, but it wasn’t in my daily experience. I was still living everywhere, in the process of accumulating, getting things and stuff, fancying myself a mini mogul of anything and everything. In many ways, I reached the apex of that promise — if you work hard, you become famous, then you make a lot of money… but it was lackluster at the top.”
6.
Singer Cheyenne Kimball was only 15 when her MTV show, Cheyenne, was filmed, chronicling the launch of her solo career. Then, around the time she turned 18, she joined the country band Gloriana (who opened for Taylor Swift on the Fearless tour) — only to leave the group three years later.
In 2025, she told Us Weekly, “I struggled a lot just trying to find myself. It wasn’t even about the fact that I’d already had prior success or anything. I thought I would have something to relate to, but I didn’t feel like I had anyone to relate to. I felt very lonely sometimes. … I don’t think a lot of people realized how young I was. I didn’t realize how young I was. By the time I was 21, I had just gotten to a point where I needed a break. That’s why I disappeared for a while… I didn’t really have those normal experiences of finding myself. I had other people kind of telling me what I was. … I snapped a little bit, and I didn’t have anything else to give.”
During her break, she took several kinds of therapy. She continued, “I had some brutal talks with people who made me realize that I had a mask on. I had no idea that I was just this all the time. I went full-blown Hannah Montana. I dyed my hair dark and just was like, ‘I’m hiding you.’ People didn’t recognize me anymore. And I think that was probably healthy for me at the time… I’m healed. I did the work. I think I could handle most of anything that life threw at me at this point.”
7.
Michael C. Maronna’s most notable roles were also his first — Big Pete Wrigley in The Adventures of Pete & Pete and Jeff McCallister in Home Alone. After his Nickelodeon show ended, his acting ventures slowed down. After 2004’s Men Without Jobs, he didn’t act again for six years. Then, following a short film, On Edge, in 2010, he didn’t act again for another 14 years.
In 2017, he told Talk Nerdy With Us, “After Pete & Pete was done, I went to college and travelled around a little bit. I was auditioning after college and then started working as an [electrician] doing lighting, and I’ve been in the union for the past ten years.”
Then, in 2020, he told Rewind It Magazine, “I was always interested in the technical aspects of film production and spent my whole life on sets, whether film, TV show, or commercials. I have worked in the theater as well and have family in the stage business, but it didn’t hold the same allure for me.”
“On Pete & Pete, production was on location and shot on 16mm film, as opposed to a television show shot on videotape in a studio. This afforded me a lot of opportunities to get to know the process and the equipment and to ask the crew a lot of questions. After the first season of half-hour episodes, the grips gave me a tool belt with some tools as a wrap gift. It was very sweet. A couple of seasons later, I just kept asking questions of the gaffer, and eventually he offered me a job after the show ended. My first proper electric job was on a film called Six Ways to Sunday. I auditioned for the lead role and ended up driving the electric truck for it. A lot of crew from Pete & Pete worked on the job, so it was a nice transition. The pandemic shutdown put a lot of shows on hold for a few months, but I’ve been back to work for a while. Currently, I’m working on Dickinson Season 3, starring Toby Huss,” he said.
He most recently had a cameo in I Saw the TV Glow alongside his former Pete & Pete costar Danny Tamberelli.
8.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Rick Moranis starred in many iconic movies, such as Ghostbusters, Little Shop of Horrors, Spaceballs, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. However, in 1997, he took a step back from acting to focus on his kids after his wife, Anna, died from breast cancer.
In 2015, he told the Hollywood Reporter, “I took a break, which turned into a longer break. But I’m interested in anything that I would find interesting. I still get the occasional query about a film or television role…I was working with really interesting people, wonderful people [in Hollywood]. I went from that to being at home with a couple of little kids, which is a very different lifestyle. But it was important to me. I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever. My life is wonderful.”
At no point did he actually consider himself “retired” from acting, but shifting his focus was important for his family. He said, “It wasn’t a formal decision. It began in an already busy year, where I declined a film that was being shot out of town as the school year was beginning. But I was fortunate to be able to continue to make a living writing and doing voice work in Manhattan.”
He was reportedly set to reprise the role of Wayne Szalinski in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sequel Shrunk, but according to lead actor Josh Gad, production has stalled multiple times. However, he’s confirmed to return as Lord Dark Helmet in the upcoming Spaceballs 2.
9.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas exited Home Improvement before the series ended, appearing in only three episodes of the final season in 1999. Trading acting for academia, he attended Columbia, Harvard, and St. Andrews University.
In 2013, he told People, “I’d been going nonstop since I was 8 years old. I wanted to go to school, to travel, and have a bit of a break…To sit in a big library amongst books and students — that was pretty cool. It was a novel experience for me.”
He added, “I never took the fame too seriously. It was a great period in my life, but it doesn’t define me. When I think back on the time, I look at it with a wink. I focus on the good moments I had, not that I was on a lot of magazine covers.”
He’s done a few small roles over the years, most recently guest-starring on Last Man Standing in 2015. In 2024, his former Home Improvement costar Patricia Richardson told the Back to the Best podcast, “He’s not really interested in acting. He wants to direct and write.”
10.
’90s child star Liesel Matthews only appeared in three movies, most notably A Little Princess. She hasn’t appeared onscreen since 2000’s Blast.
According to Vice, Matthews was a stage name — she’s actually Liesel Pritzker, heiress to the family who founded Hyatt hotels. In 1995, she told Entertainment Tonight, “I don’t think I want to become a huge actress or anything. And I wouldn’t make it a career. It would still be a hobby.”
Liesel majored in African history at Columbia. During her freshman year, she sued her dad and the Pritzker cousins, alleging they’d cleared out her and her brother’s trust funds in a way “so heinous, obnoxious, and offensive as to constitute a fraud.” According to Vanity Fair, the cousins allegedly made a “secret pact” to divvy up the family fortune in a way that excluded Liesel and her brother. In 2005, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the siblings settled the lawsuit, each receiving $450 million in cash and other trusts. Liesel went on to found the impact investment organization Blue Haven Initiative alongside her husband, Ian Simmons.
11.
Ian Somerhalder most famously played Damon Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries. However, after starring in the 2019 series V Wars, he left acting and moved to a farm with his family.
In 2024, he told E! News, “I love what I did for a really long time. I love making films, I just did it for so long. We had an amazing run… But this is our 2.0 version, about to be 3.0.”
12.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Lisa Jakub became known for her work in movies like Independence Day and Mrs. Doubtfire. However, at 22, she retired from the industry.
In a 2013 blog post, she wrote, “You’ve probably left a job before. Why did you leave? Probably because you didn’t enjoy it anymore. Maybe something about that job didn’t feel authentic to you or fit in with what you wanted from life. There were probably parts of your job that you really liked, but one day, when you made your pro and con list, the con side was longer. Maybe you had done the job for 18 years – like I had. Maybe it was time to do something new. That’s why I left my job. I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t awful, and I’m not whining about how hard my life was. Parts of it were really wonderful for a while. But then I got to the point where it just wasn’t fun for me anymore.”
She continued, “So, I decided I should leave before I became one of those alcoholic/eating disorder ravaged/drug addicted train wrecks of a former child actor. I had no desire to be a cautionary tale… So, since I left LA a decade ago, I’ve been trying to bury Lisa Jakub. I’ve buried her with going to college, getting married, becoming a writer, and learning how to use my stove. I’ve been trying to forget that the old life existed. Everyone has something that they try to cover up about themselves, something that makes them feel different and a little strange. Something that they worry will make them not quite fit in, like that quickie divorce or the strange uncle or the funny-looking thing on their foot. Movies happen to be that thing for me.”
13.
Karyn Parsons rose to fame as Hilary Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the ’90s. However, after the series ended, she had trouble finding roles because of the lack of opportunities for actors of color at the time. She co-created her own sitcom, Lush Life, but it was canceled after only four episodes because the new Fox studios execs decided to pull the plug on all the new comedies at the time.
Eventually, she moved to NYC, where she met her husband and started a family. She told Vice, “My interests were changing. It became very difficult to do everything, to memorize lines for a part and have to get someone to last-minute watch the kids — to race across town and do all that, and if you got a call back, do it again. I’d find myself dropping the ball a lot.”
She switched her focus to writing. Then, in 2005, she founded Sweet Blackberry, a nonprofit that teaches kids about the lesser-known aspects of Black history. She said, “When I was pregnant with my daughter, that’s when I started really thinking about what are they going to teach her in school, and what am I supposed to teach her? How do I supplement her education as a parent? As I was talking a lot about Black history and stories that you don’t hear about, my husband was like, ‘You need to do this.'”
14.
Omri Katz rose to fame as a child actor, most known for playing Max Dennison in Hocus Pocus. His last acting credit is the 2002 short film Journey Into Night.
In 2024, he told Bronx Buds, “I left the industry not too long after Hocus Pocus and kind of never really looked back.”
Two years prior, he told Bloody Disgusting, “I grew up in the industry, so that’s kind of all I knew. I think I was soul searching and wanted more of a human experience; just see what else is out there, see the world, and be normal. I didn’t really have that growing up.”
However, he returned to LA after spending time surfing, snowboarding, and traveling. He said, “I wanted to get back into acting for all the wrong reasons — to make money so I could escape again — and that didn’t work out too well. I had to get a real job, the first one in my life!”
He worked as a hairdresser until he transitioned to the cannabis industry. He said, “Obviously, I had to be discreet, stay under the radar, but I’ve been doing it ever since. I have my own brand called The Mary Danksters. We’re doing everything the legal way, and I’m really excited to see where this industry takes me. It’s been a tough thing to navigate, but I feel confident that I’ve got something to contribute.”
However, a year later, she seemingly shared her retirement from the music industry, tweeting, “I’ve always been someone who finds my joy in being creative & seeing my ideas come to life. For a long time I used music to deliver my big crazy ideas to the world. I know a lot of people have this idea that I was ‘bullied away from music’ and that’s something I’ve always laughed at because I’d never be bullied out of anything…In truth what I’ve known for a long time is that I feel more passionately about design and creative direction than I do about songwriting. That’s why I want to let you know that I’m not going to finish my album.”
She continued, “It’s been paused for a few months while I was giving direction for a different project & in truth I just haven’t felt the urge to go back to it. I feel really happy & passionate in my day to day life when my [mind’s] focused on that and so I want to stick to what’s undeniably best for me.”
16.
Yasmeen Ghauri went from McDonald’s employee to model after she was scouted during a shift. In the ’80s, she walked the runway for designers like Thierry Mugler and Gianni Versace. She was also one of the first Victoria’s Secret spokespeople.
However, she left the modeling world behind in the mid-’90s. After retiring from the catwalk, she married and started a family with Ralph Bernstein. She went on to be an advocate for breast cancer research and environmental causes.
17.
Jamie Walters famously played Ray Pruit, Donna’s abusive boyfriend, on Beverly Hills, 90210. He also starred on The Heights and sang the theme song, “How Do You Talk to an Angel?” which went number one. However, he later quit acting to become a firefighter in Los Angeles.
In 2024, he told the US Sun, “A lot of years have gone by, and I don’t think people are expecting when the fire department shows up that the guy in uniform might be somebody from a TV show in the ’90s. I’m thankful that I was able to switch gears and do something that I’m proud of and that my kids find interesting and cool. I still have a lot of friends that are in that business, but it’s a tough business. Unless you’re doing well, it’s a struggle to raise a family.”
“I started having second thoughts about this [acting] career path, and I’d always been interested in becoming a firefighter. The more I researched, I was like, oh man, it’s hard to get this job. This is really competitive. It took like three years, the process, from the time you take the written and you have medical exams, background checks, psychological, more physical agility checks. I finally got my job offer to come to the training academy in 2003,” he said.
18.
Taylor Kitsch became well-known for playing Tim Riggins in the ’00s series Friday Night Lights. He made the transition to the silver screen, but the projects that positioned him as the next big movie star — Battleship, John Carter, and Savages — were all box office flops. So, he refocused on smaller movies and, temporarily, TV, starring in a season of True Detective.
However, by his 30s, he felt lost. In 2023, he told the New York Times, “Whatever it is that motivates other people — fame, money, celebrity, more followers, I don’t [expletive] know — it was never like that. I just wanted to be a character actor that buzzed into certain things and, hopefully, made you evoke something.”
He also took time off to care for his little sister, Shelby Kitsch-Best, who was dealing with drug addiction at the time. She said, “He literally put his life on hold to help me. I don’t even know how to put it in words.”
Taylor didn’t stay away from acting forever. He went on to star in miniseries like Waco and American Primeval, going to great lengths to prepare for his roles. Then, in 2023, he took the role of Glen, a man who deals with addiction, in Painkiller to honor his sister’s journey. He brought her on set with him as an advisor, and she also cameoed as a nurse. He’s continued to take fewer roles so he can focus on ones he really wants. He said, “I pride myself on being picky, because it is so much energy and sacrifice. If I can’t be all in and really be in service of something and be scared and be uncomfortable, then I don’t want to do that… What happened [to Taylor Kitsch]? I was doing character stuff.”
19.
Shane McDermott became known for his roles in Airborne, All My Children, and Swans Crossing. However, he reportedly stopped acting because he wanted to lead a simpler life and start a family.
20.
Jewel’s 1995 debut album, Pieces of You, went 12-times platinum. She put out her second album, Spirit, in 1998, but after that, she took a two-year break from music.
She told Spin, “I couldn’t psychologically adjust to the amount of fame that I got to. By the time I was on the cover of TIME, it didn’t work for me. It was really psychologically crushing, and so giving myself two years to contemplate, ‘How do I do this? Can I do this? Does this make me happy?’ and developing a career and a strategy that upheld my number one goal, which was to make sure my mental health was the priority. Then my number two goal was I want to make the records I want, how I want, in the genre I want, that’s going to be how it is. It’s going to be an adventure.”
“The choices I made in my career, especially in the ’90s, were considered suicidal–career suicide. Taking two years off at the height of my fame was a huge no-no. Switching genres was a huge no-no, but it’s what I needed to do to keep myself psychologically healthy and creatively healthy. I had to deal with a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, she’s washed-up. She doesn’t know what to do for her third album.’ Completely misunderstood, and to make sure that didn’t bother me, and that’s your decision. It has to be water off a duck’s back. You persevere because you believe you made the right decision,” she said.
Similarly, she told First for Women, “I got so famous, I hated it. It was so bad for me. I was about to have a mental health breakdown, and I wasn’t willing to be more famous than I was happy. So I walked away from everything for two years until I could figure out how to handle it and go about my job in a different way. For me, that meant taking a big break.”
Jewel later took a seven-year break before releasing her most recent album in 2022. She continued, “When I quit for two years for my mental health, nobody was like, ‘You go girl!’ It was like, ‘She’s a washed-up has-been. She can’t handle it.’ And it was the same with taking a seven-year break to raise my son. I knew that was the right decision, and certainly it cost me my career, but it didn’t cost me my son. That wouldn’t be the right choice for everybody, but that was the right choice for me.”
21.
And finally, in the ’90s, child star Charlie Korsmo appeared in iconic movies like Hook and Dick Tracy.
In 2014, he told Case Western Reserve University’s the Daily, “As I recall, I mostly wanted to get out of school and make enough money to buy a Nintendo. I never saw acting as a lifelong career ambition.”
He left acting and had a “relatively normal” high school experience, then in college, he filmed Can’t Hardly Wait but decided that full-time acting wasn’t his calling. He said, “I think I managed the trick of leaving voluntarily just about the time I would have been thrown out anyway.”
After graduating from MIT, he worked in various government positions before going to law school. He went on to become a law professor. However, he’s appeared in a few movies over the years, most recently 2024’s A Different Man.
Do you love all things TV and movies? Subscribe to the Screen Time newsletter to get your weekly dose of what to watch next and what everyone is flailing over from someone who watches everything!