Amanda Bynes began her career at age seven and became a child superstar thanks to her work on the Nickelodeon network. Growing up, drugs and her mental health played against her and she was imposed a legal guardianship: facial tattoos, controversial tweets and rap, this is the life of this “broken toy”.

When Amanda Laura Bynes was seven years old, she appeared on television for the first time: it was a simple commercial for a chocolate brand where she had a minor role, but that girl with the sweet face and light brown hair was about to conquer audiences with her enormous charisma and her easygoing and comical personality.

Like many other child stars, the California native managed to make the leap from commercials to television and in 1996 joined the famous show created by controversial Dan Schneider , who was singled out in the middle for “inappropriate behavior” during the movement. ‘ Me too ‘, All that , known in Latin America as Todo eso .

The Amanda Show : The Golden Age of Children’s Comedy

Although the sitcom had been on the air for a few years by the time Amanda became part of the show, audiences adored her on screen and she soon became her own character ” Ashley,” a girl who received correspondence and gave advice from the public. craziest way possible. During the first episode, she was described as a “too happy and cheerful” girl. Nothing was more true then.

In October 1999, Amanda got her own space: The Amanda Show , a spin-off of the sitcom where she debuted that aired Monday through Saturday for just over three years.

The program apparently did not have a narrative logic, it was only about a group of children, including Josh Peck and Drake Bell, who years later would be part of the famous television program Drake and Josh, who changed the contents of television for things that they wanted to see with funny skits.

About her work on this show with Amada Bynes, Drake Bell recalled in an interview with E! Entertainment in 2019: “My memory of working with Amanda Bynes is incredible (..) She was a star, but there I could see her work ethic, ” he said. During her participation in that program, Amanda acted like a professional, according to the singer, despite being only 14 years old.

Amanda’s show ended in September 2002, as its protagonist had new plans on television, although he would still work hand in hand with Schneider, who produced her next program: My sister’s antics , in which he acted alongside Jennie Garth and Welsey. Johanthan.

Thus, role by role, Amanda became a benchmark in children’s comedy , went on to win up to five Kids Choice Awards, and soon debuted on the big screen in titles such as What a Girl Wants or Big Fat Liar with the star from Malcolm in the middle, Frankie Muniz.

She also shared the cover of Vanity Fair with some of the most successful teens of the time, including Hilary Duff and the Olsen twins . Over time, Bynes took the dizzying leap: from a funny girl to a sexual icon. And it was there, perhaps, where the problems began.

“The New Weight Loss Pill”: An Unfortunate Sex Icon

According to Amanda many years later in an interview with Paper magazine , the decline in her career began in 2006 , when the film A Girl in Distress was released , where she played Viola, a teenager who poses as her brother and who falls in love with her teammate on the soccer team – played by Channing Tatum -.

The actress did not like how it looked on screen. She was 20 years old and that role had affected her perception of herself: “When the film was released and I saw it, I fell into a deep depression for four or six months because I didn’t like how I saw myself as a man, ” she told the publication in 2018, an interview that intended to return her to public life after four years of not giving clues.

Seeing herself with short hair and sideburns was “a weird, out-of-body experience. It really turned me down, ”he explained. Despite this, Amanda managed to recover, momentarily, and worked on the 2007 production Hairspray, alongside John Travolta and Zac Efron.

Amanda described that production as “the best of her life.” However, around those years, he began to be susceptible to changes in her body and to worry about her weight. Suddenly, in a magazine he read an article about a “new diet pill” . It was Adderall, an amphetamine commonly used to treat Attention Disorder (ADD).

Immediately, he told the magazine, he faked the symptoms of the syndrome and managed to get the pill. Her experience with drugs began when she was just 16 years old, around the time she was ending her transition from the Amanda Show to the big screen. At that time he only smoked marijuana, giving way to “harsher” substances.

But none affected her system as much as the “diet pill” that little by little was affecting her system. In 2010 , Amanda starred on the cover of the men’s magazine Maxim . They sold the publication as “Amanda Bynes, grown and uncovered.” She had become a sexual icon of the decade, although her personal life was on the decline.

The two films she later worked on were failures for her: she gave up the Hall Pass tape , which was made in the same year the magazine came out, because she was too high to memorize her lines : “I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew Adderall because I thought they would take effect faster. I remember chewing a handful of them and not being able to concentrate on what I had to say or memorize my lines, “he told the same publication.

The same thing happened in the film Rumors and Lies , a film that featured the main performance of Emma Stone: “I could not bear my appearance in that film and I did not like my performance. I was convinced that I had to stop acting after I saw her. I was high on marijuana when I saw it, but for some reason it started to affect me deeply. I don’t know if it was a plant-derived psychosis, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It changed my perception of things, “he said.

That led Amanda to announce her retirement from acting through her Twitter account, a decision that seemed final at the time. What followed was even more sinister for the actress: she had a lot of free time on her hands and she began to abuse drugs and isolate herself in her apartment: “I was trapped at home, getting high, winding the television and tweeting,” she said.

The arrests and the wig: a legal guardianship

At that stage, Amanda turned social media upside down on more than one occasion for her tweets, where she wrote to Drake to “murder her vagina ” and fell out with Rihanna. Although she later showed regret for what happened, what she wrote ended a good part of what she built in her career , at least that is how she considered it.

When she was 27 years old, in 2013, everything was destruction for the actress and after setting fire to the entrance of the garage of a house in Los Angeles and being arrested on previous occasions for vehicular incidents and drug possession, Bynes was admitted to a psychiatric institute. At the trial where this measure was dictated, she came with a highly tangled platinum blonde wig.

Those were the darkest days for the actress and the scandals led to the imposition of legal guardianship by her parents, who declared that she was mentally unstable. The same that continues to this day and that recently transpired that it would extend until 2023.

Although, later, Amanda’s lawyer clarified to People magazine that it does not have an end date , but rather that it is extended day by day and that it will end when it is no longer the “best option for her.”

After being discharged, Amanda constantly said that she was better, although she moved away from the artistic environment. It wasn’t until 2018 that it reappeared. In that year, she offered an interview to Paper to clarify what had happened in the years prior to her internment and the guardianship of her parents, she also announced that she was studying design, a dream she had had since she was a child.

However, it was not enough, he soon posted a message on her social networks to explain that he needed space . At the end of 2020, the actress reappeared with a radical look change.

He would have made a heart-shaped facial tattoo and decided to dye her hair black. Later, she announced that she would marry her fiancé, Paul Michel, with whom she currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

Now, according to one of the many Instagram accounts where she shares content, she has explored other disciplines such as rap and, according to different media, remains sober. However, it would be difficult to remove the marks left by its transit through Hollywood. Every day is a fight for this child star who gave up fame, even though the show hasn’t given up on her yet.

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