Celebs Who Left Hollywood At The Height Of Their Fame And Decided To Live Pretty Normal Lives

1. After playing Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Karyn Parsons co-created her own sitcom, Lush Life, but it was soon canceled. She eventually moved to New York, where she studied filmmaking, 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.”

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Woman with curly hair in floral dress stands smiling in front of a collage of photos from various periods

2. ’90s teen heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas left his role on Home Improvement before the series ended, deciding instead to focus on his education at Columbia, Harvard, and St. Andrew’s University.

Talk show host interviewing a guest on a late-night set with a cityscape backdrop; both are smiling and dressed in formal attire

A person in glasses wears a casual brown jacket over a plaid shirt, smiling while walking indoors. An elevator and another person are in the background

3. Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey on Malcolm in the Middle for seven seasons, left acting for good in 2010. After attending the University of Southern California, he’s now a graduate student studying Victorian Literature.

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Teen in a tuxedo with a bow tie and a pink ribbon pin, smiling at an event

Frankie Muniz in a suit on a red carpet event, with blurred attendees in the background

Frankie Muniz posing beside a race car, wearing a Ford Performance racing suit with sponsor logos, looking confident

5. Good Luck Charlie and Lemonade Mouth actor Bridgit Mendler traded in Hollywood for a Master’s degree from MIT and a Doctor of Law degree from Harvard. She now works in the space industry as the CEO of her startup Northwood Space, which aims “to build satellite ground stations that are designed with mass production and customer flexibility first in mind.”

Bridgit Mendler smiling at an event, wearing a sleeveless top with lace accents and jeans, in front of a colorful backdrop

A person speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt, gesturing with hands. They wear a sleek red jacket and have a microphone headset

A person in a cluttered, high-tech lab, holding a remote. They wear glasses and a shirt with a tie, looking intently at the equipment

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7. Disney star Kay Panabaker retired from acting in 2012, following roles in Summerland and Cyber Bully. Though she already had a degree in history from UCLA, she decided to go back to school and entered an 18-month animal program at Santa Fe College in Florida. Following that, she was hired as a zookeeper at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

In 2016, she responded to a fan who asked her why she quit acting and said, “I just lost the love for acting. Life is short, we spend so much time at work, gotta do what you love 🙂 and I love my job!!”

8. If you can believe it, Peter Ostrum, the actor who played Charlie in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, left the entertainment industry and became a dairy veterinarian. According to Ostrum, he stopped acting because “being in the film industry as a child was hard.”

he was in the original version before the Johnny Depp movie

In 2011, he told Hollywood Chicago, “In the end, leaving was the right decision. … I don’t have any regrets at all.”

Person signing autographs at an event, sitting at a table with "Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory" posters

9. Erik von Detten, aka the ’90s and ’00s Disney star of The Princess Diaries and Brink! fame, eventually left acting behind and went into finance. He said to E! Online, “At that time, we didn’t have Netflix and all these expanded options with thousands and thousands of roles. I would literally go for a length of time without any roles that I fit the bill for. I mean, you’re either in the very top half a percent doing very well or, well…it’s just very competitive.”

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He said, “Since I was a kid, I wanted to have a large family. And, in Los Angeles, that requires a consistent, realistic income. So, the fickle nature of employment as an actor just wasn’t consistent enough for me.”

A man in a suit and open-collared shirt stands with two children on a red carpet at a Disney event

Actress in a lobster-themed dress and matching headpiece, smiling on set with a decorative background

11. Though he hasn’t left the spotlight entirely, Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder officially retired from acting in 2019. Since stepping away, Somerhalder has focused on raising his kids on a farm with wife Nikki Reed, starting companies, and producing documentaries that focus on how “regenerative farming and improving the world’s soil can help combat climate change.”