Jennifer Grey had already been in Ferris Bueller's Day Off before Dirty Dancing made her a name people actually remembered. The 1987 film grossed over $200 million worldwide and gave her the line "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." A rhinoplasty soon after reportedly changed her appearance enough that casting directors stopped recognizing her at auditions. She has said it herself: she went into the operating room a celebrity and came out anonymous. | © Vestron Pictures
Picture Rupert Grint at eleven, red hair and all, stepping onto the Harry Potter set in 2000 as Ron Weasley. Eight films and a decade later, he was still mostly known as Ron Weasley. That's not a knock on the work, it's just what happens when a franchise runs that long and that big. Grint has said he turned down scripts afterward because they felt too close to the role that made him famous. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Thora Birch was seventeen when American Beauty won Best Picture at the 1999 Oscars. She played Jane Burnham opposite Kevin Spacey in a film that made nearly $360 million on a $15 million budget. Nothing she did afterward, including Ghost World in 2001, reached that level of cultural conversation again. The strange part is the movie itself hasn't aged into the untouchable classic people expected back then. | © DreamWorks Distribution
Josh Hartnett turned down the lead in Superman Returns and reportedly passed on a Batman role too. Back in 2001, he was the guy carrying Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down in the same year. Both films combined grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide. He has since said the fame itself felt unbearable, which tells you the peak and the exit were basically the same decision. | © Walt Disney Company
Nobody saw Alicia Silverstone coming until Amy Heckerling cast her as Cher Horowitz in 1995. Clueless made about $56 million domestically against a $12 million budget and turned "As if!" into a phrase every teenager repeated. She even landed a reported $10 million deal with Columbia Pictures off the strength of it. Few actresses have ever had a single role define them so completely, so fast, and so permanently. | © Paramount Pictures
Three Transformers movies between 2007 and 2009 put Shia LaBeouf in the biggest franchise on the planet. He was also the lead in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that same stretch, which made him Steven Spielberg's pick twice over. His later work turned genuinely strange and often brilliant, but none of it reached that box office again. The swinging vine scene still gets brought up every time his name does. | © Paramount Pictures
Freddie Prinze Jr. made four romantic comedies in three years, including She's All That in 1999 and I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997. For a stretch there he was the default casting choice for a certain kind of teen lead. Then the genre itself lost its audience, and he stepped back from film almost entirely to focus on television writing and voice work. He's voiced Kanan Jarrus in Star Wars Rebels for years now, which is its own kind of career nobody saw coming in 1999. | © Miramax Films
The O.C. premiered in 2003 and Mischa Barton, playing Marissa Cooper, became the face of an entire network's teen demographic almost instantly. Fox killed the character off in season three, a decision that still gets debated as either necessary or a mistake the show never recovered from. Barton has talked publicly about how brutal the press coverage of her got during those same years. Nothing she did afterward got anywhere near that level of attention, good or bad. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Jonathan Taylor Thomas was pulling in more fan mail than almost any other teen actor during Home Improvement's run from 1991 to 1998. He walked away from the show before its final season to focus on college, which is not the usual move for someone at that altitude of fame. He's directed and produced quietly since, mostly out of the spotlight by choice. The kid from Tiger Beat covers chose a normal life over a bigger one, and actually stuck with it. | © ABC Domestic Television
Amanda Bynes had her own Nickelodeon sketch show, The Amanda Show, by the time she was fourteen. She carried What a Girl Wants and She's the Man through her teens and early twenties without much strain. In 2010 she announced she was retiring from acting, then spent the following years dealing with publicized legal and mental health struggles instead of new film roles. She hasn't returned to the screen since, and the retirement that sounded like a headline turned out to be literal. | © Sony Pictures Releasing
Twenty thousand sit-ups a day. That's the number Taylor Lautner has cited for how he transformed his body between the first Twilight film and the rest of the franchise. The work paid off in box office terms, with the saga grossing well over three billion dollars worldwide. What it didn't do was translate into a career past 2012, when the series ended and the leading roles mostly stopped coming. | © Summit Entertainment
By 2004, Lindsay Lohan had already done The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday, and Mean Girls, three hits before she turned eighteen. Tina Fey wrote Mean Girls specifically hoping to work with her, which says something about where her reputation stood then. Legal trouble and a string of tabloid years followed almost immediately after. The industry's read on her shifted faster than her actual talent did. | © Paramount Pictures
Edward Furlong was thirteen when James Cameron cast him in Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, picked after a casting director spotted him at a Pasadena boys club. The film made over five hundred million dollars worldwide and turned him into an instant name. He kept working through the nineties in films like American History X, but the momentum never matched that first role again. Few child actors have ever opened at a ceiling that high. | © Tri-Star Pictures
Six years old, that's how young Haley Joel Osment was when he first started acting, and just eleven by the time The Sixth Sense hit theaters in 1999. The film earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, making him one of the youngest nominees in that category's history. "I see dead people" became one of the most quoted lines of the decade almost overnight. Nothing he did after, including A.I. Artificial Intelligence, reached that same cultural volume again. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
There's a specific image everyone defaults to: Macaulay Culkin's hands on his cheeks in Home Alone, a scream frozen mid-frame. That 1990 film made over four hundred and seventy million dollars on an eighteen million dollar budget, numbers nobody expected for a kid-led comedy. He was ten years old and suddenly the biggest young star on the planet. The rest of his career has spent three decades living in that single image's shadow. | © 20th Century Fox
For some actors, the biggest role came first and everything after felt like a long, slow descent from that high. Here are 15 famous actors whose career peaks came way too early.
