Why macaulay culkin retired from acting

Then at 15, Macaulay retired from his onscreen career, spending nine years out of the spotlight before returning to acting. The decision came as Macaulay also legally emancipated himself from his parents, and it's something he has spoken about in the past. But in a recent interview, his brother, actor Kieran Culkin , offered new insight into Macaulay's life as a child star, including some of the reasons that Macaulay stepped away from acting in his teens and early 20s.

Read on to see what Kieran shared about his older brother. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter , Kieran explained that he and his six siblings started acting in productions around New York City when they were kids. A stage manager neighbor got them into it when he heard a production needed children. They have six or seven of them and I think the father was an actor. Maybe they would be interested,'" Kieran recalled.

Soon it got to a place of like, 'Sure, you want kids? What gender? What age? But it could have been worse, you know? I've got something to show for it, man. I mean, look at me: I got money, I got fame, I got a beautiful girlfriend and a beautiful house and beautiful animals. Culkin was married to actress Rachel Miner from to He then dated actress Mila Kunis for eight years before their split in His next significant relationship has been with his current girlfriend, actress Brenda Song.

The couple started dating in after meeting on the set of Changeland , a comedy directed by Seth Green. He knows who he is, and he's per cent okay with that.

And that to me is an incredibly sexy quality. He's worked really hard to be the person he is. And their relationship just goes from strength to strength with the couple now talking babies.

Because nothing turns you on more than when your lady comes into the room and says, 'Honey, I'm ovulating. Merry Christmas to me, from all of you! My new middle name has been chosen. You voted and the winner is clear. In my new legal name will be: Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin. It has a nice ring to it if you like my name. Overall, it seems Macaulay is a well-adjusted former child actor who is having fun doing what makes him happy. Brenda mentioned to Esquire that she would love to see him get back into acting.

So who knows? Perhaps this is only the beginning of an epic Hollywood comeback. How did we not know, you wonder. When Home Alone first appeared on screens, 27 years ago next week, and instantly became as much a part of Christmas as It's A Wonderful Life and Fairytale of New York, we ought really to have suspected there would be some casualties.

Even the poster for the film - a small boy, his mouth open and his face in his hands - evoked The Scream by Edvard Munch. I f the s, with its litany of burnt-out child stars, had taught us anything, it should have been that one doesn't get to become a world leader in winsomeness without there being some fairly major collateral damage. Yet somehow, like the plot of the movie itself - which is, after all, two burglars attempting to kill an abandoned child - the potential horror of Home Alone seemed to hide in plain sight.

At the time, the consensus was that we were watching our generation's Shirley Temple, rather than a cautionary tale waiting to happen. Audiences all over the world ate up the festive goodness, which radiated from Macaulay Culkin's scampering and scamp-like central performance.

To burnish his status as the envy of every boy in the western world, he became friends with Michael Jackson and starred in the video for Black Or White. He appeared to have the world at his feet, and just as there is now a demand for ever younger, ever more beautiful Kardashians, so there was then a demand for more angelic-yet-brattish Culkins.

Receive today's headlines directly to your inbox every morning and evening, with our free daily newsletter. Enter email address This field is required Sign Up. The large brood of Culkin siblings - Christian, Dakota, Kieran, Rory, Shane, and Quinn - was described by the Los Angeles Times as being "somewhere between the Waltons and the Bradys", a production line of wholesome child talent in an industry notorious for eating its young. Its success gave Macaulay's manager and father, Kit, tremendous influence in Hollywood because, if you wanted Macaulay, you had to go through this hot-tempered former PR executive.

In , Premiere magazine rated Kit Culkin the 48th most powerful person in Hollywood, ahead of Michael Douglas and Eddie Murphy, but he began making enemies. Studio bigwigs complained that he often tried to use his power to wrest creative control of Macaulay's movies and to promote the other siblings. Eventually, as he began to make missteps in the roles he picked for his golden child, the execs turned on him.

When Richie Rich, Macaulay's final movie as a child actor, bombed at the box office in , Kit was declared box office poison. The family began to unravel. Kit and Macaulay's mother, Patricia, began a custody war to rival the bitterness of Woody and Mia.

It looked like all of the millions their child had brought the family would be eaten up in legal bills. To understand how one family could so quickly conquer Hollywood and so quickly fall from grace, one has to go back to the start, to , when Kit and Patricia met.

Patricia, a year-old country girl from North Dakota, one of a family of 10 kids, was directing traffic when Kit, a struggling actor with a ponytail, happened by in his pick-up truck and chatted her up.

In her retelling of it, they left town almost immediately, driving east and living like hippies, until they finally arrived where he had grown up, Manhattan. He was, she recalls, "handsome, intelligent - who better to have kids with?