Love Actually star Olivia Olson has told of how she turned her back on the big screen as she feared she was close to a "mental breakdown". Olivia played American schoolgirl Joanna in the festive favourite but decided to pursue a different career.
The child star, who belted All I Want For Christmas at the end of the film, revealed she was told by a casting director to lose 10lbs for a role when she was aged just 12 - and said she has also had her ethnicity questioned throughout her career.
Olivia felt she was close to "a mental breakdown " due to the constant criticism and decided to turn her back on the big screen, the Mirror reports.
"The auditioning process is constant rejection and at that age, having casting directors saying literally to your face, when you are 12 years old, ‘Oh, we would like you if only you dropped 10lbs’. It’s like, ‘What?’," she told The Sun.
“Any person who says that to a kid needs to re-evaluate, but it’s just how the world worked at the time."
She decided to work as a voice-over artist instead, adding that in that industry it "didn't matter what she looked like".
Now 30, Olivia said her race was often at the centre of obnoxious comments as she constantly found herself being put up for Hispanic roles and asked if she could speak Spanish.
As the actress is not Hispanic, she had to explain she could not speak the language.
“People would ask, ‘What are you?’ It makes you feel like a zoo animal,” she said.
Olivia - who starred alongside Hugh Grant, Martine McCutcheon, Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson - will be celebrating the film's 20th anniversary.
Her character Joanna Anderson was the love interest of Sam - who was played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who went to extreme lengths to confess his love to her.
She left viewers stunned 20 years ago when she beautifully belted out Mariah Carey's hit. Film producers even had to ask her to tone it down in a bid to make it more believable as her singing was so good.
Olivia soon found herself thrown into a very different world after she got the part in Love Actually which was the first film she auditioned for. Along with her 15-year-old mum, she was adopted as a baby.
The pair lived in Westlake Village, California, with their adopted parents comedy writer Martin Olson, 66, and his wife Kay, a retired artist and astrologer.
Olivia said that she often thinks about the fact that she could have been raised by her young mum on the streets and that she had a lucky escape.
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