“Goonies” actor Jeff Cohen said, “It was a forced retirement. I didn’t give up acting. Acting gave me up.”
Warning: This post mentions sexual assault, drug misuse, and depression.
Plenty of celebrities hang up their proverbial Hollywood hats and retire of their own free will. Maybe they want to enjoy all the money they’ve made in peace or raise their kids in total privacy. Sometimes, however, something unexpected happens, leaving them feeling like they have no choice but to step away.
Here are 14 celebs who withdrew from the spotlight for heartbreaking reasons (and if they ever came back):
1. 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, Ann, died from breast cancer in 1991.
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.”
Rick is making his long-awaited return to acting in the upcoming movie Spaceballs 2. It will be his first movie since 1997, when he starred in Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.
2. In the ’90s and ’00s, Brendan Fraser became a household name with roles in movies like Encino Man and The Mummy. However, things changed in 2003, when he reported that he was allegedly sexually assaulted by former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk. Brendan reportedly thought that the HFPA may have blacklisted him as a result.
In 2018, he spoke about the alleged assault for the first time publicly, telling GQ that he didn’t have “the courage to speak up for risk of humiliation, or damage to [his] career.” He alleged that, during an HFPA luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2003, Philip offered a handshake. The actor continued, “His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around.” Fear and panic overtook him, but he got the man’s hand away. He said, “I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry… I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint on me.”
Brendan said, “I became depressed. I was blaming myself, and I was miserable — because I was saying, ‘This is nothing; this guy reached around, and he copped a feel.’ That summer wore on — and I can’t remember what I went on to work on next… [The experience] made me retreat. It made me feel reclusive… I don’t know if this curried disfavor with the group, with the HFPA. But the silence was deafening… [Work] withered on the vine for me. In my mind, at least, something had been taken away from me.”
Seeing peers who’d had similar alleged experiences encouraged him to speak out. He said, “I know Rose [McGowan], I know Ashley [Judd], I know Mira [Sorvino] — I’ve worked with them. I call them friends in my mind. I haven’t spoken to them in years, but they’re my friends. I watched this wonderful movement, these people with the courage to say what I didn’t have the courage to say… Am I still frightened? Absolutely. Do I feel like I need to say something? Absolutely. Have I wanted to many, many times? Absolutely. Have I stopped myself? Absolutely.” After speaking out, he had a career resurgence, most notably winning the Oscar for Best Actor in 2023.
3. Ke Huy Quan played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies. His early success made him think that he “was going to have this amazing career.” However, there were few opportunities for Asian actors, and most of the available parts were small and rooted in stereotypes. He told People magazine, “It was tough. I was waiting for the phone to ring, and it rarely did.”
So, he made the “very difficult decision” to quit acting in the early ’00s. Focusing on his talents behind the camera, he graduated from film school and then found success as an assistant director and stunt coordinator. However, when Crazy Rich Asians — Hollywood’s first movie with an all-Asian cast in 25 years — debuted in 2018, he was inspired to return to acting. He said, “I was happy working behind the camera, but I had serious FOMO. I wanted to be up there with my fellow Asian actors!”
He landed the first role he auditioned for — Waymond Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once. In 2023, he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Onstage, he said, “I owe everything to the love of my life, my wife Echo, who month after month [and] year after year for 20 years told me that one day, one day my time will come. Dreams are something you have to believe in. I almost gave up on mine. To all of you out there, please keep your dreams alive. Thank you, thank you so much for welcoming me back.”
4. In the ’40s and ’50s, Bobby Driscoll worked extensively with the Walt Disney Company and even won a Juvenile Academy Award at age 12. (Until 1961, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sometimes awarded these honorary, half-sized Oscars to child actors for especially outstanding performances. The award was discontinued once young performers began competing directly with adults in the regular acting categories.) Most notably, he voiced the titular character in Peter Pan when he was 16. However, in 1953, he was released from his contract early. The studio’s decision reportedly had to do with his “severe acne.”
His Peter Pan costar Kathryn Beaumont attributed it to Howard Hughes’s purchase of RKO. She told Entertainment Weekly, “He, in effect, became the owner of the Disney studio. He controlled the money, and he hated Bobby Driscoll. He hated Hollywood kids. He thought they were precocious, weren’t real, and were incredibly annoying. He didn’t want Bobby Driscoll to be with Disney anymore.”
At 24, Bobby was arrested and “charged with being an addict and accused of trying to pass a worthless check.” He reportedly told a judge, “I had everything…was earning more than $50,000 a year…working steadily with good parts. Then I started putting all my spare time in my arm. I’m not really sure why I started using narcotics. I was 17 when I first experimented with the stuff. In no time at all, I was using whatever was available…mostly heroin, because I had the money to pay for it… During all this time I’ve hurt a lot of people…especially my parents, my wife, my children, and myself. My parents are fine people. I’ve hurt them terribly.”
He tried to find roles, but because of his arrests, he couldn’t get hired. While on parole, he found work as a carpenter, then he moved to NYC, where he became involved with Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory. However, he never made his way back into the acting industry. He continued to struggle with drug misuse. In 1968, kids playing in an abandoned tenement building found his body. He was only 31.
5. Former Disney Channel star Kay Panabaker became known for playing Debbie Berwick on Phil of the Future and Jamie Bartlett in Read It and Weep. But as she got older, her love for acting diminished. She told Naperville Magazine, “The kicker for me was when a producer told me that they were going to be bringing on a love interest for [my TV character] and that I needed to lose weight because of that; I was barely 100 pounds. I didn’t think this was a good reason for a character to lose weight. I was 21 at the time the show ended. I spent a couple years after that in LA, still auditioning, but the passion wasn’t there.”
So, she went back to school for zoology, completed an 18-month animal program in Florida, completed an internship at Walt Disney World, then began working as an associate animal keeper at Animal Kingdom. She said, “Looking back, finding my true passion was worth all of the extra time. … That aspect was missing in my previous career and is something that feeds my soul in my current line of work. I love it when I leave work and have felt like I was able to inspire and make a difference, even if it was just one person that day. I don’t earn a fraction of what I used to, and yet, I couldn’t be happier.”
6. Mean Girls actor Rajiv Surendra left the industry after putting six years of his life into a role he ultimately lost. He told GQ, “While we were shooting Mean Girls during my first year of college, I found out they were turning The Life of Pi into a film. I was determined to get that part. So I dropped out of college to go to the little town in India where the book takes place so that I could do some in-depth research. I did that for a few months and came back and was just waiting for them to start production. I assumed that it was going to happen any day now, and it didn’t. They lost their director, and the project ended up getting put on hold, so I went back to college.”
He said that, after being rejected, “I felt like someone had died. Very slowly over the course of six years, I was building this boy that was a character in a book. By the end of those years, that was a real person inside of me. Those old Tamil songs I listened to as a kid, Pi would’ve listened to those songs. When I got the email saying I didn’t get the part, I felt like that person just died instantly. It was traumatic. I think I was in shock for a couple weeks. I felt dead inside for a long time.”
In need of a job, he applied at the bank where his mom and sister worked, but he quickly decided he’d “rather not be here on earth” than work in a cubicle. So, he became an au pair in Munich instead. A year later, he went home to Toronto, where he started his own small business doing calligraphy. Eventually, he also did a prestigious pottery apprenticeship. He went on to work as an artist and content creator.
7. 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.”
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.”
8. Jennette McCurdy became well-known for her Nickelodeon roles, most notably Sam Puckett on iCarly and Sam & Cat, but her last onscreen role was Peggy in the 2018 short film The First Lady. On her Empty Inside podcast, she said, “I quit a few years ago to try my hand at writing and directing. I quit…because I initially didn’t want to do it. My mom put me in it when I was 6, and by…age 10 or 11, I was the main financial support for my family. … My experience with acting is I’m so ashamed of the parts that I’ve done in the past…but I resent my career in a lot of ways. I feel so unfulfilled by the roles that I played and felt like it was the most just cheesy, embarrassing [experience].”
Outside of acting, Jennette has worked as a screenwriter, director, podcaster, comedian, and author. In her 2022 memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, she detailed the abuse she faced from her mom, who pushed her into acting. Jennette has gone on to become a bestselling author. She released her debut novel, Half His Age, in early 2026.
9. In the ’90s, Julia Ormond became well-known for movies like Sabrina and Smilla’s Sense of Snow. However, toward the end of the decade, her career shifted to indie films and supporting roles. She later claimed she suffered career damage after reporting that Miramax cofounder Harvey Weinstein allegedly assaulted her. In 2023, she filed a lawsuit against film producer Harvey Weinstein, Miramax, Disney, and the Creative Artists Agency. She alleged that, in 1995, Weinstein sexually assaulted her after a dinner. The lawsuit stated, “That sexual assault on Ormond could have been prevented if Miramax or Disney had properly supervised Weinstein and not retained him while knowing that he was a danger to the women he encountered at work.”
She also alleged that CAA didn’t warn her about Weinstein and “suggested that if she reported Weinstein to the authorities, she would not be believed, and he would seriously damage her career.” The lawsuit continued, “Still worse, not long after Weinstein’s assault on Ormond and her reporting of the assault to them, CAA lost interest in representing her, and her career suffered dramatically… The damage to Ormond’s career because of Weinstein’s assault and the aftermath was catastrophic both personally and professionally.”
10. Jeff Cohen played Chunk in The Goonies, but when he could no longer be typecast in “fat kid roles,” he was forced into retirement. He told the Daily Mail, “There were basically about four fat kids in town, so every time there was a fat kid role, you saw the same people at the audition. It was survival of the fattest. But when I hit puberty, it was a career-ender for me. I was transforming from Chunk to hunk, and I couldn’t get roles anymore. It was terrible. My first love was acting, but puberty had other ideas. It was a forced retirement. I didn’t give up acting. Acting gave me up.”
However, upon Jeff’s retirement, Goonies director Richard Donner hired him as a production assistant. Richard also wrote him a college recommendation letter, then paid his tuition. Jeff told Variety, “I had to sit down because, for me, paying for college was going to be a problem. That changed my life. Not only economically, but it showed that Dick and [his wife] Lauren believed in me.” He grew up to be an entertainment lawyer.
11. Caitlin Sanchez began voicing the lead character in Dora the Explorer in 2008. When she was 14, Nickelodeon allegedly fired her from the role because her voice changed as a result of puberty. In response, she filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the studio, alleging that they “used convoluted payment deduction clauses and additional free services provisions to underpay Caitlin for her acting and recordings, force her to work hundreds of hours marketing the Dora Brand for free … and withhold her residual payments and merchandise percentages, all contrary to what she was originally promised.”
However, the lawsuit was later settled for $500,000. She seemingly has not acted since her Dora days.
12. Devon Sawa rose to fame as the human version of the titular ghost in 1995’s Casper, but as he got older, he struggled to get away from associations with the role. In 2022, he told the Independent, “I had to smoke pot in movies, and I had to be in a hip-hop video. That’s what I felt like I had to do to get away from ‘Can I keep you?’ Everybody wanted to hear, ‘Can I keep you?’ It drove me nuts.”
He put his career on hold from 2004–2009 after his heavy alcohol use prompted his agents to suggest a break from acting. He said, “It wasn’t completely my choice to take the break. I was burnt out; I was drinking too much. I was partying too much. And so I went back to Vancouver and got sober. After a couple of years, I met my wife, and we went away to southeast Asia. I wrestled with the idea of never acting again. I had started doing a little bit of real estate in Vancouver. I bought a little old building and started to renovate it myself… I don’t know who didn’t get the memo that I was not in the business anymore, but I decided to put myself on tape for [Max Payne]. And the casting [office] called back — they really liked me for it.”
He didn’t get the role, but the experience inspired him to get back on the horse. He said, “All of a sudden I had a new manager, and I thought, ‘Let’s give it another shot.’ I felt like I had a reset… The doors didn’t open very quickly. There was a lot of, ‘Oh, I remember he didn’t show up to the audition because he was partying the night before,’ or whatever it was.” Eventually, he caught a break with Nikita, and he’s gone on to appear in projects like Chucky and Hacks.
13. Shirley Temple was a massive child star in the 1930s, landing leading roles in films such as Curly Top and Dimples. However, when she was 12, Fox canceled her contract after a single box office failure. She signed a new contract with MGM, but she only did one movie — Kathleen — with the studio.
She continued to work with various studios for another 10 years, but at 22, she decided to quit because she was still being typecast. Later that year, she married Charles Alden Black — who’d never watched any of her films — then moved to Washington, DC. A few years later, she began working in politics. She ran for Congress, worked for the UN, then served as the US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
14. And finally, 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.”
Now, Cheyenne is a licensed aesthetician, and she’s also working on new music.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.