Actor Mara Wilson remembered her friend and fellow 1990s child star, the late Michelle Trachtenberg, in a moving essay.
Wilson, who starred in “Matilda,” shared fond memories of Trachtenberg, star of “Harriet the Spy,” in a piece published by Vulture on Tuesday, several weeks after Trachtenberg was found dead in her New York City apartment.
“Not only was she nice, I realized, but she was remarkably intelligent,” Wilson wrote of meeting Trachtenberg at the 1997 Kids’ Choice Awards. “Yet she managed not to be condescending and didn’t try to impress with big words, the way other kids (including me) might have. She was smart, but she was also self-possessed, and didn’t need to show off.”
The pair became fast friends. As Wilson put it, the two “had the kind of closeness that grows between girls who’ve spent a short but intense amount of time together, like summer-camp friends.”
After the press tours for their films died down, Trachtenberg and Wilson wound up at the same school. Wilson thought her friend would be a fan favorite with her peers, but it was the opposite. She recalls kids referring to Trachtenberg as “full of herself” and “a total bitch.”
Eventually Trachtenberg pulled Wilson aside to have a heart-to-heart.
“Are the kids here mean to you?” she asked.
A young Wilson responded, “Sometimes.”
Trachtenberg then revealed that her classmates gave her nicknames such as “Harriet the Slut, Harriet the Bitch, and Harriet the Bitchy Spy.” After recounting these experiences, Wilson states that she had “never seen Michelle cry before.”
“It wasn’t just that she was being bullied; it was that there wasn’t any way she could get them not to hate her,” Wilson recalled. “So much of being a child actor is about making everyone happy. It felt cruelly ironic to be so hated when our raison d’être was getting people to like us.”
After the two parted ways, Wilson always defended her friend, even when college friends would make crass statements based on her character in the TV show “Gossip Girl.”
When the “Mrs. Doubtfire” actor found out about Trachtenberg’s death, she had a sinking feeling in her stomach.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. She was too young. She’d worked too hard,” she wrote.
Other stars paid tribute to Trachtenberg soon after her death.
“Heartbreaking,” “Harriet the Spy” co-star Rosie O’Donnell said in a statement to Us Weekly. “I loved her very much.”
Sarah Michelle Gellar, her “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” co-star, likened the loss to losing a sister.
“‘Michelle, listen to me. Listen. I love you,’” Gellar wrote in a post shared to her Instagram account. “I will always love you. The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it. I will be brave. I will live… for you’ ????????????????️”