One-Hit Wonder Child Stars You Didn't Know Died

One-hit wonders are usually associated with music — acts that enjoy a single hit song or album across their entire creative lives. It's a phenomenon that pops up in other realms, like Hollywood. For every actor who forges a lasting, decades-long career, or more specifically, a child star who successfully segues into grown-up roles, there are numerous other performers who appear prominently in one big hit TV series or feature film... and then fade into obscurity. There are many reasons why a once-promising youth actor never ascends beyond their brief bit of screen fame. Some child stars completely disappear, choosing to walk away from acting, while others struggle to land meaningful roles because they're brutally typecast, forever associated with their childhood or teenage success. Others tragically die before they can prove their mettle beyond that one part they dazzled audiences with when they were kids.

No matter the circumstances of why those actors are one-hit wonders, all of them eventually die, some far too early and in particularly tragic ways, and usually after they've been so far out of the public eye for so long that their deaths go under-reported. Here are some tragic stories about one-hit wonders: the briefly successful child actors who died without much fanfare.

Five-year-old Heather O'Rourke was hanging out in the cafeteria at MGM Studios one day in the early 1980s when she was scouted by a Hollywood luminary. Blockbuster filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who would produce and co-write the 1982 horror movie "Poltergeist," thought that O'Rourke, who at the time had a resume consisting of a single episode of "Fantasy Island," would be right for the part of Carol Anne Freeling, kidnapped by evil forces via a light source emanating from a closet. Despite many bizarre things happening on set, "Poltergeist" would prove to be a hit, and O'Rourke — responsible for the film's spooky, sing-songy catchphrase, "They're here!" — would go on to appear on a few episodes of TV shows such as "Webster" and "Happy Days" but most notably reprise the role of Carol Anne in "Poltergeist II: The Other Side" and "Poltergeist III."

In February 1988, O'Rourke reported abdominal pain so severe that her parents quickly took her to Children's Hospital of San Diego. The 12-year-old actor died during surgery, from what doctors diagnosed as complications of intestinal stenosis, a serious obstruction of the small intestine that O'Rourke had dealt with since birth. That blockage allowed an infection to develop, which created sepsis, which stopped the actor's heart. About seven months before her death, O'Rourke completed work on "Poltergeist III." It arrived in theaters in June 1988, four months after O'Rourke died.

Before MTV's "TRL" disappeared, it popularized boy bands. The show made such huge stars out of the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC that MTV got into the boy band business while simultaneously mocking the fad. In 2000, it aired the TV movie "2gether," about an assembled five-guy singing group of the same name. It spawned a TV series, book, and albums, and 2gether hit the road as Britney Spears' opening act. Like other boy bands, 2gether included an adorable, baby-faced, member: Jason "Q.T." McKnight, portrayed by actor and singer Michael Cuccione. He'd appeared in single episodes of just two series before he began playing Q.T. full time in 2000.

In childhood, Cuccione was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer. By the age of 10, doctors pronounced him to be cancer-free. In late 2000, 15-year-old Cuccione and his mother were involved in a car accident, and that led to the singer checking in to British Columbia Children's Hospital for surgery to repair a damaged diaphragm. While under medical supervision, he developed pneumonia. His lungs had grown so irreparably damaged from the chemotherapy treatments he endured during his bout with childhood cancer that he wasn't able to recover or breathe without a machine. In January 2001, eight days after his 16th birthday and while the "2gether" series was still running, Cuccione died after a lung collapsed.

Jon Paul Steuer showed up in a handful of TV series in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including "Day by Day," "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and "The Wonder Years." When ABC built a sitcom around popular stand-up comic Brett Butler in 1993, 9-year-old Steuer was cast as Butler's character's gentle young son, Quentin Kelly. The show, "Grace Under Fire," was a top 10 hit and earned Steuer a nomination at the Young Artist Awards in 1995. But in 1996, after three seasons on "Grace Under Fire," he left the series by order of his parents. Butler's on-set behavior had grown unacceptable, including an alleged incident in which she exposed herself in front of Steuer. The role of Quentin was aged up and recast with replacement actor Sam Horrigan. Steuer permanently quit acting at that point.

He later switched to music and adopted the stage name Jonny Jewels, under which he'd front the Portland-based rock band P.R.O.B.L.E.M.S. On January 1, 2018, according to an investigation by Portland police, Steuer died by suicide. The former child star was 33 years old.

When Oscar-nominated filmmaker Richard Linklater endeavored to remake the '70s comedy "The Bad News Bears" in 2005, he had to find an actor for the role of star youth baseball pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer — hopefully someone who was as good at baseball as she was at reading lines. Linklater found his candidate in Sammi Kane Kraft, who hurled a 75 miles per hour fastball at her audition. Kraft was 13 years old when "The Bad News Bears" was released, and the film marked her professional acting debut and also her finale. After making "The Bad News Bears," Kraft attended high school in Woodland Hills, California, played softball, and formed a band, Scary Girls.

At around 1:30 a.m. early on October 9, 2012, Kraft was riding in an Audi going over the speed limit on a freeway in Los Angeles. The driver, Molly Kate Adams, who was later arrested on a charge of felony drunk driving, hit a semi truck from behind, and the Audi then absorbed impact by another vehicle. Kraft was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead from the injuries suffered in the accident. Kraft was 20 years old.

The three kid characters  on CBS' smash hit "Everybody Loves Raymond" were played by the same three young actors for the entirety of its 1996 to 2005 run: real-life siblings Madylin, Sullivan, and Sawyer Sweeten. All took home $100,000-per-episode paychecks toward the end of the series, but Sawyer Sweeten in particular faced financial problems a decade later because he was unable to land any acting jobs — he never appeared on-screen again after "Everybody Loves Raymond." Sweeten, among the child stars who lost all their money, was deeply in debt by 2015. After a business he formed didn't take off, he didn't have a substantial income in the face of the state of California issuing a lien to recover unpaid taxes. Desperate and depressed, Sweeten died by suicide on April 23, 2015, at the home of a relative in Brownwood, Texas — the place the actor was born and raised before he was cast on "Everybody Loves Raymond."

"This morning a terrible family tragedy has occurred," Madylin Sweeten said in a statement to Variety. "We are devastated to report that our beloved brother, son, and friend, Sawyer Sweeten, took his own life. He was weeks away from his 20th birthday."

After featuring in a touring production of the musical "Annie Get Your Gun" at the age of 6, Tommy Rettig moved on to movies in 1950, co-starring in more than a dozen, including "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" and "River of No Return." But none of his films had the cultural reach of one of the most famous dogs in history. Rettig edged out more than 500 kid actors to win the role of Jeff Miller in "Lassie," the first TV adaptation of Eric Knight's heroic collie book, "Lassie Come Home." Rettig stayed with "Lassie" for three years, at which point it was rebooted into a new series of the same name about a boy named Timmy and his dog. Rettig showed up occasionally on TV shows in the 1960s, and except for a cameo as Jeff Miller on "The New Lassie" in 1992, he left acting behind in 1969. He'd later find work as a photographer, computer programmer, and gym manager while publicly advocating for the legalization of marijuana. 

On February 15, 1996, Rettig's body was discovered at his home in Marina del Rey, California. An initial autopsy attributed the death of the former actor to natural causes. Rettig was 54 years old.

Dustin Diamond was 11 years old when he first portrayed ultra-smart, socially awkward misfit Samuel "Screech" Powers in 1988 on the Disney Channel series "Good Morning, Miss Bliss." When that series was adapted into the NBC Saturday morning teen sitcom "Saved by the Bell," Diamond went along, reprising the role for 86 episodes plus two made-for-TV movies, the short-lived spinoff "Saved by the Bell: The College Years," and then for another 130 episodes of "Saved by the Bell: The New Class," which was canceled in 2000. Diamond was so adept at playing the quintessential TV nerd that he had a hard time getting the chance to play anything else. While Diamond landed the occasional role in a B-movie or a primetime sitcom before, during, and after his "Saved by the Bell" years, he often played a fictionalized version of himself.

Diamond checked into a Florida hospital in January 2021, noting unexplained and serious full body pain. A number of exams and tests later confirmed that Diamond had an advanced and malignant form of cancer, stage 4 small cell carcinoma. On February 1, 2021, only three weeks after receiving his diagnosis and despite receiving chemotherapy, Diamond died at the age of 44.

In 2016, Nikita Pearl Waligwa made her acting debut in "Queen of Katwe," based on the true story of Phiona Mutesi, who grew up in an impoverished area of Uganda and became a global chess champion. Opposite Madina Nalwanga as Mutesi, Waligwa played the future chess phenom's close friend and early chess-playing partner, Gloria. Like her character, Waligwa was born and raised in Uganda, and she attended Gayaza High School, a boarding academy near the capital city of Kampala.

"Queen of Katwe" would be the only project in which Waligwa would appear, because she didn't live long enough to pursue acting any further. On February 15, 2020, Gayaza High School announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Waligwa had died. "You were a darling to many and we have lost you to brain tumor at such a tender age," the school wrote. In the final years of her life, Waligwa was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which turned out to be of the fatal, cancerous variety. The actor was 15 years old.

In 1953, TV was young, and so was Rusty Hamer, who began his career with small parts in anthology series before being cast as Rusty Williams on "Make Room for Daddy," later retitled "The Danny Thomas Show." The sitcom about a nightclub entertainer and father of three ran for 12 years, solidifying Hamer in the public consciousness as one and the same with his character. During the long run of "Make Room for Daddy," Hamer appeared in just three other projects, two of them crossover TV episodes where he played Rusty Williams. Hamer later portrayed Rusty Williams on "The Danny Thomas Hour" and "Make Room for Granddaddy." The latter, a 12-episode early '70s reboot, marked the last time that Hamer appeared on television.

By early 1990, Hamer was coping with a lot of pain, mentally and physically. "He hasn't really been happy since his early 20s," the actor's brother, John Hamer, told the Los Angeles Times. "I've heard of a lot of child actors who have become unhappy with their lives after they've left the industry." Hamer also experienced severe back pain but declined formal medical treatment. Rusty Hamer lived in a trailer outside the town of DeRidder, Louisiana, and that's where John Hamer found the body of his brother on January 18, 1990. Local police determined that the actor died by suicide. Rusty Hamer was 42 years old.

An instant hit upon its debut in 1986, the sitcom "ALF" launched a pop culture phenomenon. Based around a hip, wisecracking alien ("ALF" stands for "alien life-form") represented by a puppet, the title character hid out in a suburban home, annoying everyone in his human host family except for its always amused youngest member, Brian Tanner, portrayed by child star Benji Gregory. Before "ALF," Gregory found a supporting role in "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and landed some supporting roles in live-action TV, and after "ALF" ended in 1990, he'd contribute his voice to the animated "Back to the Future" TV series and "Once Upon a Forest." In adulthood, the actor, born Benjamin Hertzberg, abandoned acting and enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he worked as a weather forecaster upon an aircraft carrier.

According to Gregory's sister, Rebecca Hertzberg-Pfaffinger, the former actor's body was discovered in his car on June 13, 2024, next to that of his service dog, outside of a bank in Peoria, Arizona. "We believe he went there the evening of the 12th to deposit some residuals and never got out of the car to do so," Hertzberg-Pfaffinger wrote on Facebook. "He fell asleep and died from vehicular heatstroke." Gregory was 46 years old.

With a $102 million box office haul, "Mary Poppins" was far and away the top-grossing movie of 1964. The Disney-produced adaptation of P.L. Travers' classic children's novel about a magical nanny won Julie Andrews an Academy Award and shot its child stars to fame, including 8-year-old Matthew Garber. Before playing Michael Banks, the neglected child of a busy banker, he'd appeared in only one other project, the forgettable 1963 magical cat movie "The Three Lives of Thomasina." After "Mary Poppins" raised his stature, Garber made just one more film, the 1967 family comedy "The Gnome-Mobile."

In the 1970s, Garber embraced an itinerant, hippie lifestyle and headed to India, where a number of enclaves established by like-minded Americans and Europeans had developed. While traveling around India in 1976, Garber acquired hepatitis. According to the actor's brother, it remained unknown how that happened, but it was most likely from consuming tainted meat. By the time Garber's family persuaded him to return home to England for medical treatment in 1977, it was too late — the disease had taken hold and irreparably damaged his pancreas. In June 1977, Garber died of hemorrhagic necrotising pancreatitis at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He was 21.

As the daughter of film producer and novelist Dominick Dunne and the brother of filmmaker and "An American Werewolf in London" star Griffin Dunne, Dominique Dunne was properly set up for lasting celebrity and movie success. In 1979 and 1980, she slowly broke into Hollywood with a succession of roles in the TV movies "Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker" and "Valentine Magic on Love Island," and episodic work on shows such as "Lou Grant" and "Family." Dunne found her breakthrough role in the 1982 horror movie "Poltergeist," portraying teenager Dana Freeling, part of a family whose home is beset by evil spirits. She filmed and taped several more episodes of TV shows such as "CHiPs," "HIll Street Blues," and "V," most of which would air after her death.

In 1982, Dunne broke up with her boyfriend, chef John Sweeney, rejecting his possessive and jealous behavior and abhorring their verbal altercations and several incidents of battery and abuse. Sweeney once tore out Dunne's hair, and another time, attempted to strangle her. When Dunne tried to break things off for good, it sent Sweeney into a rage, and he once again strangled her, this time to death. He was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served less than four years in prison. Dunne was 22 years old when she died.