The Charlie’s Angels star has revealed the reason why she walked away from her acting career despite being one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Cameron Michelle Diaz, 48, is an American retired actress who is also an author, producer, and model. In 2013, she was named the highest-paid actress over 40 in Hollywood.
Her awards include four Golden Globe Award nominations, three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, and a New York Film Critics Award.
Her success continued for over a decade, but the actress decided to give up her acting roles in 2014. In a candid chat with Kevin Hart, 42, on his Peacock talk show, Hart to Heart, the star said she wanted to make her life easier to manage.
“Why did Cameron Diaz step away from the world of acting?” Kevin asked the retired actress.” What is it that motivated you to stop?”
“When you do something at a really high level for a long period of time, other parts of you have to sort of be handed off to other people,” Cameron replied. “I just really wanted to make my life manageable by me. My routine in a day is literally what I can manage to do by myself. I feel whole.”
The star said she reached this conclusion when she was around 40 and it gave her the opportunity to reassess every aspect of her life.
Cameron said this included “different parts of my life, my home, every aspect, from finance, just the management of me as a human being, not me as Cameron Diaz the machine.”
In 2018, during a reunion with her “The Sweetest Thing” co-stars, she acknowledged she was “actually retired” from acting. She explained that being a movie star left her feeling like a product in her own life.
“When you’re making a movie, it’s a perfect excuse,” she said. “They own you.”
“You’re there for 12 hours a day. For months on end, you have no time for anything else,” she continued. “I realized I handed off parts of my life to all these other people and they took it.”
“I had to basically take it back and take responsibility for my own life,” she added. “That’s my job. There’s a lot of things I had to iron out, a lot of relationships I had to repair, a lot of relationships I had to build that were absent in my life.”
Cameron said during an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow for Goop, how her mentality has changed as she got older and the impact her career had on her well-being and relationships.
“I just decided that I wanted different things out of my life,” Cameron shared. “I had gone so hard for so long, working, making films and it’s such a grind. I didn’t really make any space for my personal life.”
“I got a peace in my soul,” she added. “Because I was finally taking care of myself.”
The former actor said she decided to really focus on her relationships with family and friends after handing over control of certain aspects of her life to other people for many years.
“I met my husband, we started a family, all the things I didn’t have time for before, and not just the time for but didn’t have the space to make the decisions, the right decision for me at the time,” she said.
In the six years since Cameron Diaz last appeared onscreen, the actress married the lead guitarist of Good Charlotte, Benji Madden in 2015. She also launched a “clean wine” brand called Avaline.
By leaving acting she could redirect her energies to things like her husband, Benji, and their daughter, Raddix, who came along in December 2019.
“I love being a mother,” she said on an Instagram chat. “It’s the best, best, best part of my life, I’m so, so grateful and so happy and it’s the best thing ever and I’m so lucky to get to do it with Benj.”
Cameron Diaz’s last performance will be as Miss Hannigan in the 2014 remake of the musical Annie. She has also released two books, “The Body Book” and “The Longevity Book”.
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