Anna Chlumsky was only 10 when My Girl turned her into one of the most recognizable child stars of the early 1990s.
As Vada Sultenfuss, the precocious girl navigating grief, friendship and first love alongside Macaulay Culkin’s Thomas J., Chlumsky delivered the kind of childhood performance people remember decades later. The 1991 film became a cultural touchstone, and a sequel followed three years later. (Wikipedia)
But while Hollywood saw a promising young actress whose career was only beginning, Chlumsky increasingly wanted something completely different.
By her late teens, she had had enough.
She left acting, enrolled in college and tried to build a life in which nobody needed her to be the little girl from My Girl.
And that’s where she met Shaun So — the man who would eventually become her husband.
‘My Girl’ Made Her Famous Almost Overnight
Released in 1991, My Girl paired Chlumsky with Macaulay Culkin, who was already a phenomenon after Home Alone.
Chlumsky played Vada, an 11-year-old growing up in a funeral home with her widowed father. Culkin played her shy best friend, Thomas J.
The friendship between the two children became the emotional center of the movie.
And then came the scene an entire generation still remembers.
Thomas J. dies after being attacked by bees, and Vada’s reaction at his funeral — desperately asking why he isn’t wearing his glasses — became one of the most devastating moments in a family movie of the era.
For Chlumsky, however, the success brought a complicated new reality.
She wasn’t simply Anna anymore.
She was Vada.
Childhood Stardom Wasn’t Nearly as Magical Behind the Scenes
As Chlumsky grew older, the industry that had celebrated her as a child became increasingly difficult to navigate.
She later described how fame affected her adolescence and her sense of herself, telling The Independent that as a young performer she felt as though she was “for sale.” (The Independent)
The experience became especially difficult as she entered her teenage years.
Auditions weren’t simply about acting. She became acutely aware of being judged on her appearance and marketability while simultaneously experiencing the ordinary insecurities of adolescence.
Eventually, she realized she wanted out.
She Made a Decision Most Child Stars Never Get to Make
After My Girl 2, Trading Mom and Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain, Chlumsky gradually stepped away from acting.
From 1999 until 2005, her screen career effectively went on pause. (Wikipedia)
And she didn’t spend those years waiting for another Hollywood offer.
She went to college.
Chlumsky enrolled at the University of Chicago and studied international studies, graduating in 2002. (The Independent)
Years later, she described that choice as an enormously important act of independence.
“Going to college was my first act of standing up for myself,” she told The Independent, explaining that it finally allowed her to ask what she wanted rather than simply continuing down the path chosen for her as a child. (The Independent)
And college changed far more than her career.
It’s where she met Shaun.
She Met Her Future Husband at a College Party
Chlumsky and Shaun So met in 2000 while they were students at the University of Chicago. (Wikipedia)
Their first encounter was wonderfully ordinary compared with the Hollywood childhood Chlumsky had just escaped.
They met at a university dance event known as Spring Fling.
Chlumsky later recalled dancing with So there and then spotting him again the following day while waiting for a concert featuring Eminem and The Roots.
She pointed him out to a friend.
Her friend promptly yelled his name.
And, as Chlumsky later put it, the rest was history.
There were no casting directors involved.
No movie premiere.
No child-star expectations.
They were simply two college students who liked each other.
Shaun’s Life Was Almost the Opposite of Hollywood
So eventually chose a path far removed from his girlfriend’s former profession.
He joined the U.S. Army Reserve and served a tour in Afghanistan. Contemporary reporting on the couple identifies him as an Army Reserve veteran, and Chlumsky has spoken publicly about what it was like maintaining their relationship during his military service. (Wikipedia)
That created a very different challenge for their young relationship.
They spent long stretches apart.
The couple dated long-distance for years, and So’s deployment meant their communication could become extremely limited. (Los Angeles Times)
For someone who had spent childhood living a life that often seemed extraordinary from the outside, Chlumsky was now confronting something intensely real: loving someone whose work could put him in danger thousands of miles away.
They Survived His Deployment to Afghanistan
So returned from Afghanistan in January 2006. (Los Angeles Times)
By then, the couple had already endured years of long-distance dating and the uncertainty of military deployment.
A few months after he returned, their relationship entered another chapter.
So proposed.
The engagement became public in 2007, with reports noting that the couple had originally met as University of Chicago students. (Wikipedia)
They married on March 8, 2008, in Brooklyn. (Wikipedia)
But something else had happened by then.
Anna Chlumsky had started acting again.
Her Attempt at a ‘Normal’ Career Didn’t Feel Right Either
After college, Chlumsky initially tried to build a conventional career away from entertainment.
She worked as a fact-checker for restaurant guide Zagat and later as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins. (The Independent)
On paper, she had accomplished exactly what she had wanted.
She had escaped childhood fame.
She had a university degree.
She had a job outside Hollywood.
She had a serious relationship that had nothing to do with celebrity.
Yet something still wasn’t right.
Chlumsky eventually realized that acting itself hadn’t been the problem.
The problem was the relationship she’d had with the industry as a child.
As an adult, she could make a different choice.
She Went Back to Acting — This Time on Her Terms
Chlumsky trained seriously before returning, including studying at the Atlantic Acting School.
Then she began auditioning again.
This wasn’t an attempt to recreate her childhood fame.
She worked in theater, independent movies and smaller television roles, gradually rebuilding a career from the ground up.
The transition ultimately led to Armando Iannucci’s political satire In the Loop in 2009.
And a few years later, Iannucci gave her the role that would completely redefine her career.
Amy Brookheimer.
‘Veep’ Made Her Famous Again — but This Time as an Adult
When Veep premiered in 2012, Chlumsky was no longer the former child star attempting a comeback.
She was a formidable comedic actress.
As Amy Brookheimer, the perpetually stressed political operative orbiting Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer, Chlumsky became one of the show’s central performers.
The role ultimately earned her six Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. (Wikipedia)
It was a remarkable second act.
She had become famous at 10.
Walked away.
Spent years outside acting.
Returned.
And then became acclaimed for something completely unrelated to the character that had made her famous.
Even more importantly, her personal life was growing at the same time.
In 2013, ‘My Girl’ Took on an Entirely New Meaning
On July 11, 2013, Chlumsky and So welcomed their first daughter, Penelope Joan. (Los Angeles Times)
The timing was almost comically appropriate.
One week later, Chlumsky received an Emmy nomination for Veep.
So within days, she had become a mother and received one of the biggest professional honors of her adult career. The Los Angeles Times even joked that the phrase “my girl” had suddenly acquired a very different meaning for her. (Los Angeles Times)
Three years later, their family grew again.
Their Second Daughter Arrived in 2016
Chlumsky gave birth to Clara Elizabeth on July 28, 2016. (Los Angeles Times)
She and So were now raising two daughters while managing careers that couldn’t have been more different.
Chlumsky was spending long days on television sets.
So had transitioned from military service into business and entrepreneurship.
And despite Chlumsky’s public career, they kept their children largely outside the celebrity spotlight.
That choice feels particularly significant considering Chlumsky’s own childhood.
She knows firsthand what it means to become publicly recognizable before you’re old enough to fully understand what fame entails.
The Viral Graphic Gets One Big Detail Wrong
The graphic says Chlumsky is now “raising 3 kids with her out-of-spotlight husband.”
Reliable biographical reporting documents two children, not three.
Chlumsky and Shaun So have two daughters: Penelope Joan, born in July 2013, and Clara Elizabeth, born in July 2016. (Los Angeles Times)
There is no reliable evidence in the sources reviewed here that the couple has a third child.
The rest of the broad story, however, is remarkably close to reality.
She really did step away from Hollywood to attend college.
She really did meet her future husband there.
And the man she met while trying to build a life outside acting is still her husband more than two decades later.
Shaun Built a Career Almost Entirely Outside Entertainment
After his military service, So moved into entrepreneurship.
His professional background has included work involving government, technology and consulting, and he became the founder and CEO of The So Company, a consulting business working with government agencies and other organizations.
It couldn’t be further removed from his wife’s work.
While Chlumsky attends premieres and awards ceremonies, So has generally maintained a far lower public profile.
He occasionally accompanies her to events, but he hasn’t attempted to build celebrity from his marriage.
And perhaps that makes sense considering where their relationship began.
He didn’t meet Anna Chlumsky at a Hollywood party.
He met Anna, the college student who was deliberately trying to figure out who she was when acting wasn’t defining her.
She Has Never Pretended Her Childhood Fame Was Entirely Wonderful
As an adult, Chlumsky has been unusually thoughtful about what happened to her.
She hasn’t dismissed My Girl or the opportunities it gave her.
But she has also resisted romanticizing childhood stardom.
The entertainment industry, she has explained, made her aware very young that her appearance and commercial value were being evaluated by adults. The pressure became tangled with ordinary adolescence in ways she found deeply uncomfortable. (The Independent)
Going to college therefore wasn’t simply taking four years off.
It was reclaiming control.
For the first time, she could decide what she wanted to study.
Where she wanted to live.
Who she wanted to date.
And whether acting actually belonged in her future.
Ironically, Leaving Hollywood May Have Saved Her Relationship With Acting
Chlumsky eventually discovered something surprising.
Once she had walked away from acting, she was able to miss it.
And when she returned, she did so as an adult with boundaries and perspective that the 10-year-old star of My Girl could never have possessed.
“The years away definitely gave me perspective,” she later said. (The Independent)
That perspective helped produce an adult career arguably even more impressive than her childhood one.
Six Emmy nominations for Veep followed.
She appeared in Halt and Catch Fire.
Then came Netflix’s Inventing Anna, where she played journalist Vivian Kent opposite Julia Garner. (Wikipedia)
Suddenly, younger viewers knew Anna Chlumsky without necessarily knowing Vada Sultenfuss at all.
Meanwhile, ‘My Girl’ Never Really Went Away
For those who grew up in the early 1990s, however, Vada remains unforgettable.
The movie has survived partly because it doesn’t treat childhood grief as something simple.
Vada begins the story obsessed with death but unable to understand what losing someone she genuinely loves will feel like.
Then Thomas J. dies.
And the little girl who lives in a funeral home suddenly understands grief in a way she never wanted to.
Chlumsky’s performance made the moment devastating.
More than three decades later, viewers still associate her with it.
She and Macaulay Culkin Took Very Different Paths
There’s something fascinating about looking back at Chlumsky and Culkin together.
Both became enormously recognizable as children.
Both experienced the strange consequences of early fame.
And both eventually stepped away from the conventional Hollywood machine for significant periods.
Their adult lives, however, developed very differently.
For Chlumsky, college became the dividing line.
There was Anna the child actress before the University of Chicago.
And Anna the adult actress afterward.
Shaun So belongs firmly to that second life.
At 45, She Has Something Her 10-Year-Old Self Couldn’t Have Imagined
Chlumsky turned 45 in December 2025. (Famous Birthdays)
She has now been married to So since 2008.
They’ve survived long-distance dating, military deployment, the uncertainty of her career restart and the pressures of raising two children while maintaining demanding professional lives. (Los Angeles Times)
And Chlumsky has achieved something relatively unusual for a former child star.
She didn’t simply survive the role that made her famous.
She built an entirely separate career afterward.
Today, somebody could recognize her as Vada from My Girl.
Another viewer might immediately think of the frantic Amy Brookheimer from Veep.
Someone else might know her from Inventing Anna.
They’re all looking at the same actress.
But the woman behind those characters spent years figuring out who she was when nobody was watching.
The Life She Found While ‘Running Away’ Became the One She Kept
Perhaps that’s the sweetest irony in Chlumsky’s story.
She went to college partly because she wanted distance from Hollywood.
She wanted education.
Independence.
Perspective.
A chance to make decisions that weren’t dictated by the career she’d begun as a child. (The Independent)
And while she ultimately returned to acting, she kept something from that other life.
Shaun.
The young man she met at a college dance in 2000 became the Army veteran she waited for during deployment, the man who proposed after coming home, her husband in 2008 and eventually the father of their two daughters. (Los Angeles Times)
Hollywood got Anna Chlumsky back.
But this time, she returned on her own terms.
For more heartwarming tales, read about how Jean Smart Found the Love of Her Life on a TV Set – After Losing Him 35 Years Later, She Never Expected to Fall for Someone Again.
