She’s All That! Amanda Bynes has had a roller-coaster of a ride in Hollywood since she first rose to fame as a cast member on the ‘90s Nickelodeon sketch show.
The California native broke into the entertainment business at the age of 7 and quickly became one of the biggest child actors of her generation. After putting her comedic talents on display on All That for a few seasons, she landed her own series, The Amanda Show, which ran from 1999 to 2002.
As her time on both comedy shows came to a close in 2022, Bynes made her big screen debut as Kaylee in Big Fat Liar. Her success in movies only grew from there, landing the role of Daphne Reynolds in 2003’s What a Girl Wants before starring alongside Channing Tatum in 2006’s She’s the Man.
The What I Like About You alum remained a Hollywood staple throughout the early 2000s, with hits that included Hairspray and Sydney White. She took a brief hiatus from acting in 2010 and announced at the time that she was retiring at 24, explaining via Twitter that “being an actress isn’t as fun as it may seem.”
She quickly “unretired” a few weeks later, sharing that she was playing Marianne in 2010’s Easy A, which also starred Emma Stone and Penn Badgley.
Two years later, the former child star’s personal life began to make bigger headlines than her career after she was arrested on suspicion of DUI in April 2012. While she pleaded not guilty, Bynes was charged with two misdemeanor counts of hit-and-run in September 2012.
The following year, the comedian was placed under a temporary conservatorship in August 2013 amid an accumulation of mental health and substance abuse issues. The decision came one month after Bynes was hospitalized and put on a psychiatric hold for setting a fire in a stranger’s driveway in July 2013.
The Canned actress has since been vocal about her struggles with mental health, telling Paper Magazine in November 2018, “I just had no purpose in life. I’d been working my whole life and [now] I was doing nothing. I had a lot of time on my hands, and I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long. [I was] hanging out with a seedier crowd and I isolated a lot … I got really into my drug usage, and it became a really dark, sad world for me.”
The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising graduate — who hasn’t had an acting role since 2010 — filed to end her conservatorship in February 2022 after nearly nine years. According to court documents obtained by Us Weekly, Bynes “desires to live free of any constraint” in the future after working toward becoming a healthier and independent person free from drugs.
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Scroll down to see Bynes ups and downs over the years:
