It never made sense to her, Mara Wilson writes in Good Girls Don’t, that the enduring image of a child actor is of a spoilt brat. “A bratty child is one who won’t do what they’re told; child actors only do what they’re told. Brats are selfish and greedy; child actors often support their families. A spoilt and misbehaving child will not get very far in the entertainment industry.” Wilson, the star of some of the biggest family films of the 90s, including Mrs Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street and Matilda, only wanted to please.
She wrote the short-form memoir – an ebook and audiobook for the digital platform Scribd – after thinking a lot about what a “good girl” she had been and the impact it has had on her life. It opens at a teen disco on a cruise with her family; Wilson, then about 16, was made to feel she had to dance with a boy, just because he was a fan (he didn’t really speak, just grinded on her). Rather than think of herself, she was worried about what everyone else would think when they saw: “Matilda’s a slut!” What she felt, or wanted, didn’t come into it. Eventually, in her later teens and 20s, Wilson rebelled against all this pressure and became, she says, angry and “a bitch”.
