'90s Stars Who Are Unrecognizable Now

Everything is cyclical. After death, animals become soil, which nourishes plants, which in turn become food for animals. The seasons follow each other every year. And most horrifying, decades you remember living through the first time will reemerge as nostalgia factories for your peers and objects of giggling fascination for generations younger than your own. Nineties kids who remember mining the '70s for bell bottoms and smiley-face decals can now only watch in horror as Gen Z mines their past for the lols. (Brace yourself for a JNCOs revival any day now.)

And celebrities — they're just like us! Though they have a few more tips and tricks (and generally way more dollars) than the rest of us to try to slow the passage of time, they've lived through the last 30 years just like everyone else. And while some look like gently aged versions of themselves and work in the business that made them famous, others have undergone transformations that can cause fans to do a double take... and count on their fingers just how many years it's been.

The sitcom "Designing Women" was a classic of '90s television: Strong female characters wore even stronger shoulder pads, with Very Special Episodes on topics such as racism, sexism, and HIV. One of the stars of the initial cast was former Miss Florida Delta Burke, who played the vain and eccentric beauty queen Suzanne Sugarbaker. Burke left the cast after the hit show's fifth season amid rumors about her behavior on set and very public tabloid criticism of her weight gain. The show limped on for another two seasons, but without Burke and castmate Jean Smart, who played ditzy, good-hearted receptionist Charlene Frazier, audiences soon dropped off.

Burke later discussed the depression she experienced during her time on the show, with its attendant disordered eating and diet-pill use. After starring in "Women of the House," a short-lived sitcom that saw her "Designing Women" character seated in Congress (imagine thinking about Congress as an escape), Burke stepped away from Hollywood, occasionally appearing in guest spots but building her life elsewhere. She stayed married to former co-star Gerald McRaney, who provided support during Burke's continued experiences with depression and hoarding. (According to an interview with Closer Weekly, the star once had 27 storage units but has reported progress on the issue.) Today, Burke and McRaney live in Central Florida, with each occasionally taking acting work between relaxing walks along the beach.

One of the most memorable sounds of the 1990s was the high-pitched, nasal drone of Jaleel White's character Steve Urkel on the hit sitcom "Family Matters." The sitcom was part of a wave of African American-centered television, with "Die Hard" alum and emerging American treasure Reginald VelJohnson as the head of the Winslow family. But VelJohnson, and everyone else, was upstaged by dweebtastic Steve Urkel, whose planned one-episode arc turned into years of television stardom. Written as the nerd of all nerds, Urkel's catchphrases, chief among them "Did I do that?" and "Got any cheese?," were probably among the most commonly spoken English sentences for a while there. It was Urkel's world; we just lived in it.

Perhaps to some surprise, Jaleel White grew up to be a handsome and confident adult. While his subsequent projects have never matched the all-consuming popularity of Urkel, he's continued working, finding particular success as a game show host. He's continued to give interviews about "Family Matters," celebrating the legacy of the groundbreaking sitcom while speaking openly about the problems the role caused him. A recent memoir, "Growing Up Urkel," revealed tensions with adult cast members as well as damage to White's real voice from using the Urkel register so consistently during puberty. (With help from speech therapists, the problems are now in remission.) Despite these challenges, he speaks fondly of his time on the show... but is honest about having no interest in a reboot.

Johnny Depp has endured plenty of hardships throughout his life, but he spent the '90s building a career any actor might envy. Having been established as one of his generation's handsomest stars in his first role in "A Nightmare on Elm Street," Depp proceeded to prove he was significantly more than just a pretty face, appearing in cult hits like John Waters' "Cry-Baby" and Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" as well as steamy dramas like "Don Juan DeMarco." By 1996, he was appearing as himself in films and sitcoms: You know they love you when they don't even write a character for you, they just ask if you'd like to show up.

As time went by, Depp developed a niche for himself, doing a lot of movies where he had bizarre hair (the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" remake, and a lot of Tim Burton outings in which he was paired with Helena Bonham Carter and her own feral coiffures). So far, so uncombable, but Depp's reputation took an enormous hit during his very public separation from and subsequent legal battles with his now ex-wife, actress Amber Heard. While Depp won damages from Heard after a court found her liable for defamation, commentators and observers found his reported behavior... unsympathetic at best. His career may go on, but for many fans his image will remain stained. 

The 1990s was the era of the supermodel. A handful of women became the faces of fashion (and indeed much of popular culture), driving tastes instead of reflecting them and becoming celebrated public figures in their own right. One of the original Big Five supermodels was Linda Evangelista, a Canadian-born beauty whose effectively perfect face graced hundreds of magazine covers over the decade. She also became notorious for a quote given in a Vogue interview (via the Independent) that seemed to encapsulate the entitled reputation of her and her peers, stating that she wouldn't "get out of bed for less than $10,000." (This quote was given during an interview in which she also drank vodka, chain-smoked, and ordered chocolate cake; it's easy to imagine her being celebrated had she said it in 2024.)

Recently, Evangelista has made headlines for less glamorous reasons. In 2015 and 2016, Evangelista underwent CoolSculpting procedures, in which extreme cold is used to spot-reduce fat. Unfortunately, she experienced an unusual side effect in which targeted fat cells grew instead of shrank, changing her appearance and, per a lawsuit she filed in 2021, leaving her disfigured and unable to continue working as a model. While she reported a period of seclusion after the problem initially arose, in recent interviews she's seemed more at peace with the changes, focusing on friendships and motherhood. (The 2022 settlement of her lawsuit likely also adds to her calm demeanor these days.)

Edward Furlong's first credit remains his most impressive: He starred as the destined savior of the human race, John Connor, in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." The young Furlong joined Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton in a sequel that arguably punched harder than the original, and the budding star seemed destined to shine. And for a while, he did. While never quite matching the level of his breakout role, Furlong worked throughout his adolescence in film, TV, music videos, and a series of Japanese instant noodle commercials. But it's hard to live up to being cast as the savior of the world at 12 years old, and both Furlong's career and his personal life would ultimate fail to weather the challenges of child stardom.

In the '00s, Furlong publicly struggled. He lost the opportunity to reprise his role in "Terminator 3" due to his drug use, was arrested for erratic behavior involving alcohol, and landed in legal trouble for domestic violence. The troubling behavior continued into the 2010s, with further domestic abuse charges in 2012 and 2013. For a while, he seemed destined to join the ranks of child stars who were better known for legal trouble than their continued careers. Now sober and open about his past troubles with substance abuse, he's begun to work again, starring recently in a couple of horror flicks and a feel-good movie about a horse. Whether future audiences will accept a comeback tour after Furlong's repeated arrests for domestic violence remains an open question.

"Roseanne" was one of the iconic TV sitcoms of the 1990s. The working-class Conner family, normal-looking people who lived in profoundly unglamorous Lanford, Illinois, and had jobs they hated, were more relatable than New Yorkers with perfect hair and creative economy jobs. The show may have gone off the rails at the end — in one of the darkest sitcom episodes of the decade, the last season was revealed to have been a novel written by the widowed central character — but "Roseanne" at its best was TV comedy at its best. Sharp but loving, perceptive without (usually) becoming maudlin, the show made its star, comedienne Roseanne Barr, a household name.

After "Roseanne" ended, Barr made forays into film, production, talk-show hosting, and even reality television, starring as herself trying to make a go of a macadamia nut farm in "Roseanne's Nuts." Her behavior gave fans (and studio execs) a degree of concern, especially her apparently unguarded social media use. In 2018, she tweeted a racist comment about an Obama administration official, leading to her firing from the reboot of "Roseanne" (retitled "The Conners" after her character's death from an opioid overdose) and her subsequent acrimonious comments about her erstwhile coworkers on the project. Since then, Barr has remade herself as a right-wing media personality while also returning to her stand-up roots.

If you had to distill the early '90s into one image, you could do worse than the Kevin McCallister scream from "Home Alone." A blond child, wide-eyed and bellowing with his hands clapped to his cheeks, somehow captured the zeitgeist... and if you had the misfortune to be a blond little boy around that time, you would be asked to recreate it. Culkin followed up this beyond-iconic performance with roles in "Richie Rich," "My Girl," and "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York," but by 1995 audiences were less interested in him as he entered adolescence, and public squabbles between his parent-managers added a grimy feeling to the Culkin story. For a while, many assumed he'd flame out like many a child star before or since.

Culkin defied the odds. He didn't wholly escape legal trouble, but he kept his nose cleaner than many and returned to acting in 2003 after a hiatus of a few years. After turns in quirky, adult-themed films like "Party Monster" and "Saved!," Culkin has continued working, most recently voicing some cartoon aliens in "The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy." He also continues to enjoy poking fun at his celebrity, announcing his 40th birthday in 2020 with an impish tweet asking, "Hey guys, wanna feel old?"

Canadian bombshell Pamela Anderson was one of the most prominent sex symbols of the '90s. A star of megahit "Baywatch," a drama about attractive lifeguards who managed to fulfill their duties while nearly always moving in slow motion, Anderson also came to hold the record for most covers of "Playboy" graced by a single model. (Perhaps ironically, she was the "face" of its final issue to feature nude photography, in 2016.) If you were attracted to women in the '90s (or even just buying time to come out), you were thinking about Pamela Anderson. 

Anderson's tumultuous personal life and chronic misfortune made her nearly as common in gossip as nighttime drama. The victim of a stolen and semi-licitly distributed sex tape, a second sex tape scandal, and domestic abuse, she endured some truly personal unhappiness in the public eye. Marriages to rockers Tommy Lee and Kid Rock and to professional poker player Rick Salomon, whom she married twice, ended in divorces. But happily, it seems much of that drama is behind her. Today, she remains a celebrity, though now she focuses much of her effort on conservation and human and animal rights advocacy through her Pamela Anderson Foundation. She has recently released a cookbook, "I LOVE YOU: Recipes From the Heart," dedicated to her sons. On the book's cover and on her publicity materials, she's sported less outward glamor and a much bigger, more relaxed smile than in her earlier days.

Elvira, nee Cassandra Peterson, was one of the great weird-kid (and weird adult) idols of the '80s and '90s. The horror-show hostess had plentiful goth bona fides, complete with dagger at her belt, but she was also silly, sexy, and all-around fun in a way audiences couldn't get enough of. Peterson had an eventful path to fame: She survived a horrific accident as a child, suffering serious burns to a third of her body, and then went on to receive career advice from Elvis and have a dalliance with Tom Jones. All this and her own comic book series? It seems like a fairy tale, if perhaps closer to a Grimm version.

Elvira never dropped out of the limelight, but in recent years she's been appearing more and more as Cassandra Peterson. The iconic, never-changing black dress and towering beehive still come out for in-character appearances, but fans have gotten to know the woman behind the tombstone in the most recent act of Peterson's life. (She even appears out of Elvira drag as a member of that squarest of professions, a real estate agent, in Rob Zombie's "The Munsters.") Elvira has always been a queer icon (how could she not be), and many of her fans were delighted to welcome her officially to the community in 2021, when she revealed in her memoir "Yours Cruelly, Elvira" that she'd been in a relationship with a woman for a number of years. For a woman whose catchphrase was "unpleasant dreams," Peterson seems to be living anything but a nightmare.

Canadian actor Devon Sawa's first big role, after a series of Nerf commercials, was in the fondly remembered kids' sports movie "Little Giants," which he followed quickly with a memorable turn in "Casper" opposite Christina Ricci. This early role as a ghost set the tone for much of Sawa's career, and by the late '90s he was a bona-fide horror heartthrob, starring in the silly "Idle Hands" and the original "Final Destination." 

Lately, Sawa has been digging into his horror legacy with roles in the new "Chucky" series and a few horror and suspense films, but he received Emmy consideration for his guest spot on the acclaimed Jean Smart dramedy "Hacks." While he's not currently slated to come back for any future "Final Destination" work as the franchise prepares to release its sixth installment, he's reportedly working hard to get everyone reunited for another "Little Giants" outing. In interviews, the proud dad always notes the importance of his children in his adult life... even if they won't be watching his work in "Chucky" anytime soon.

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health or an eating disorder, or is dealing with domestic abuse, contact the relevant resources below: 

• Contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.
• Visit the National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA's Live Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).
  
• Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.