Love Really star Olivia Olson has informed of how she turned her again on the large display screen as she feared she was near a "psychological breakdown". Olivia performed American schoolgirl Joanna within the festive favorite however determined to pursue a unique profession.
The kid star, who belted All I Need For Christmas on the finish of the movie, revealed she was informed by a casting director to lose 10lbs for a job when she was aged simply 12 - and mentioned she has additionally had her ethnicity questioned all through her profession.
Olivia felt she was near "a psychological breakdown " because of the fixed criticism and determined to show her again on the massive display screen, the Mirror studies.
"The auditioning course of is fixed rejection and at that age, having casting administrators saying actually to your face, if you find yourself 12 years outdated, ‘Oh, we want you if solely you dropped 10lbs’. It’s like, ‘What?’," she informed The Solar.
“Any one who says that to a child must re-evaluate, but it surely’s simply how the world labored on the time."
She determined to work as a voice-over artist as an alternative, including that in that business it "did not matter what she regarded like".
Now 30, Olivia mentioned her race was usually on the centre of obnoxious feedback as she consistently discovered herself being put up for Hispanic roles and requested if she may communicate Spanish.
Because the actress shouldn't be Hispanic, she needed to clarify she couldn't communicate the language.
“Folks would ask, ‘What are you?’ It makes you're feeling like a zoo animal,” she mentioned.
Olivia - who starred alongside Hugh Grant, Martine McCutcheon, Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson - might be celebrating the movie's twentieth anniversary.
Her character Joanna Anderson was the love curiosity of Sam - who was performed by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who went to excessive lengths to admit his like to her.
She left viewers surprised 20 years in the past when she superbly belted out Mariah Carey's hit. Movie producers even needed to ask her to tone it down in a bid to make it extra plausible as her singing was so good.
Olivia quickly discovered herself thrown into a really completely different world after she acquired the half in Love Really which was the primary movie she auditioned for. Alongside together with her 15-year-old mum, she was adopted as a child.
The pair lived in Westlake Village, California, with their adopted dad and mom comedy author Martin Olson, 66, and his spouse Kay, a retired artist and astrologer.
Olivia mentioned that she usually thinks about the truth that she may have been raised by her younger mum on the streets and that she had a fortunate escape.
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