Amy O'Neill
Amy O'Neill started as a child actress in 1984, and the recognisable part of her career was over inside a decade. Television came first, including sitcom work and the role of Molly Stark on The Young and the Restless in 1986.
Then came the part that outlived everything else: Amy Szalinski in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), and again in Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992). It is a thankless assignment on paper, the teenage daughter whose job is to be exasperated at a quarter of an inch tall, and she plays it without ever condescending to the material. Around it sit two guest roles, on the western The Young Riders (1989) and the drama Gabriel's Fire (1990).
After that she left. She joined a circus-style entertainment troupe in the 1990s, appeared in documentaries about her own childhood roles, and came back to acting only briefly in the late 2010s with two short films and a single television episode. It is a short filmography, and an unusually clean example of a child performer who stopped rather than faded.
Movies (2)
TV (2)
Where to start with Amy O'Neill
One film does all the work here. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is still the best version of its own idea, a suburban back garden turned into a wilderness by a change of scale, with real stakes and practical effects that have aged better than most of what replaced them. Amy is the sceptical eldest, and O'Neill gives her more irritation and less sweetness than the genre usually allows.
Honey, I Blew Up the Kid reverses the gag and is the weaker film, though she is unchanged in it. The two television credits are small and worth a look only if you are curious: The Young Riders is a western built for a young audience, and Gabriel's Fire is a serious adult drama, which makes it the odder booking of the two. Her soap work, including The Young and the Restless, sits outside the credits listed here.