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When you’re a kid from Hamilton, dreams of becoming an actor may feel far-fetched, but that did not stop Kathleen Robertson.
“I was just literally that kid that was like, ‘I want to be an actor,’ and people would kind of laugh at me and say, ‘Yeah, good luck with that, you live in Hamilton,'” Robertson told CBC’s Q with Tom Power.
Robertson became a child actor at 10 in 1985, according to IMDB, when she was cast in the movie Left Out about a family dealing with unemployment.
She went on to star in hugely popular shows like the ’90s cultural phenomenon Beverly Hills, 90210, in which she played Clare Arnold.
Now, she credits Canada as the reason why she has stayed grounded as a celebrity.
“I think if I had grown up in the States and I had been like a Disney kid, or I’d been on Nickelodeon and I’d had that kind of excitement around me … I could have had very different trajectory,” she said.
Robertson said in the U.S., when she tells people she used to be a child actor, they’re shocked about how levelled she seems.
“In Canada … Nobody gave a shit about it.”
‘We were not protected’ says former child actor
Robertson pointed to the “tragedies and the casualties” of the last few years involving big former child actors as examples of the pressure expectations can put on children who become famous.
While she didn’t name specific actors, in recent years prolific former child actors like Hayden Panettiere, Daveigh Chase and Michelle Trachtenberg have all died young.
Panettiere died on Aug. 16 aged 36. She worked in film and television beginning as a child and soared to fame two decades ago as a cheerleader with superpowers in the TV show Heroes.
Hayden Panettiere arrives at the premiere of “Blonde,” on Sept. 13, 2022, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. She died Aug. 16, 2026. (Jordan Strauss/AP Photo)
Chase died in June at 35, of complications from AIDS and polychronic substance abuse, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. She was the voice of Lilo in the hit Disney animated feature Lilo & Stitch.
Trachtenberg was 39 when she died on Feb. 26, 2025, of complications from diabetes. She achieved fame for her roles in buzzy millennial-era TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gossip Girl.
The untimely deaths of these stars were “not a coincidence,” Canadian former child actor Anna Paquin said shortly after Panettiere’s death.
“We were not protected by the ‘systems’ that looked great on paper, as we are supposed to be,” she said on a Instagram post last month
Paquin has been acting since she was 11, when she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for The Piano.
“We are worthy of support no matter how our industry made us feel,” she said.
Robertson working on a ‘love letter’ to Hamilton
Growing up in Hamilton, Roberson said she was never very outgoing as a kid.
“But I always, always weirdly knew that I wanted to be an actor from the time I was a little kid,” she said.
Despite the skepticism from people around her, Robertson said she kept on working towards that goal and, eventually, an open-call audition came through for Left Out.
She’s now working on a project that she hopes will depict “Hamilton for Hamilton” and not as a stand-in for other locations.
The project is a 10-episode medical show about three sisters and their mother working at the same hospital.
“The jumping off idea for me was my sisters who both worked together in the hospital in Hamilton,” Robertson said.
“This is gonna be a full-blown like love letter to the city.”
Robertson is now in the latest season of Amazon Prime’s Reacher, which was partly filmed in Hamilton.
She said people working on the series “never wanted to stay” long enough in the city for her to take them out to her local favourite spots.
“Everybody would bad mouth it not knowing I was from there,” she said.
“The Toronto crews are snobs, they don’t want to film there.”