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8 Celebrity Moms Who Considered Quitting Hollywood For Motherhood

Amanda Young

January 8, 2016

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When you’ve got plenty of money, why keep working? Many Hollywood celebrity moms gave up their careers, or at least thought about giving up their careers as soon as they had kids and fell in love with being a mother. It’s probably even more enticing when being a celebrity requires a lot of travel and harsh media attention, and many famous ladies are lucky that they don’t have to work to survive financially. Here are eight celebrity moms who have put their careers on hold or talked about stepping out of the spotlight:

8. Meg Ryan

After being lambasted by the media for having an affair with Russell Crowe on the set of the movie Proof of Life, Meg Ryan took a step back from acting for a while and focused on raising her son Jack and daughter Daisy. She starred in 2001’s Kate and Leopold, but between 2001 and 2013 she only appeared in a small handful of little-known movies such as In the Cut, Against the Ropes, In the Land of Women and Serious Moonlight (she also did voice work for an episode of The Simpsons). In 2013, her friend Delia Ephron told People Magazine that living in New York “makes you different,” adding, “Los Angeles is just about movies. New York is about so much more than that, and so is Meg.” Meg now tries very hard not to be recognized, and often escapes to places such as Martha’s Vineyard so that she can live a quieter life.

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7. Megan Fox

Megan Fox is only 29, but she’s mom to sons Noah and Bodhi, from her marriage to now estranged husband Brian Austin Green. Once she had her kids, she slowed down her career and stopped choosing uber-sexy roles. “It changes your perspective about being overly sexual in a film when you have a baby,” she said in an interview with The Mirror. “I’m going to be more cautious about choosing films because I’m already thinking about when he’s in school and his friends are going to be showing him my photo shoots with me in a bikini and he’s going to be horrified. So that will deter me from making some of the choices I made before.” Megan also said, “I don’t receive the same satisfaction from my career as I do from being a mother so I’m really happy.” She’s still going to act; she appeared in both Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, and the television series New Girl — but you won’t see her on quite as many billboards as before.

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6. Drew Barrymore

Drew Barrymore has been acting since she was 7-years-old, so we’re not surprised that the 40-year-old is getting a bit tired of it. After she got married to third husband Will Kopelman in 2012 and had two daughters, Olive and Frankie, Drew decided to shift her focus away from acting. “I think I will act less and less,” she said in an interview with Savannah Guthrie of The Today Show. “It’s hard to be present when you wake up before [the kids] and come home after they’ve gone to bed. That’s just not the way I want to have this journey with my kids at this point in their life. But maybe when they’re older, I will feel differently. At this point, I think that it has to be few and far between.” She added, “[I’m a] very traditional [mother]. I’m not organized in my life, like, I lose everything and I’m a complete disaster. With my kids, I really don’t accept that for myself because I think kids learn from example of the way you live your life.” Drew does still run a production company, so perhaps we’ll see more of her behind the camera.

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5. Mila Kunis

That 70s Show and Family Guy star Mila Kunis is another Hollywood mom who prioritizes her family over her career. “I don’t live to work, I work to live,” she told People magazine. “I never took my career too seriously before. After becoming a mom, I definitely don’t.” Mila, who’s married to Ashton Kutcher and has a daughter Wyatt, is also not thrilled about having to parent while receiving a barrage of media attention. “I think when you are a young actor couple you are screwed,” she said. “It got to a stage where I couldn’t leave the house. I love what I do, but the reality is that my privacy is gone. I’m not complaining, I just don’t like the idea that my child can’t go to the park with her mother. And if she does, then I have to trail a s—load of paparazzi with me.”

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4. Jennifer Garner

Balancing an acting career with raising children is also a struggle for Jennifer Garner, who has daughters Seraphina and Violet, along with son Sam with estranged husband Ben Affleck. “There’s an internal battle. I need to work, I need to work, I need to work and I need to be home with my kids and the kids win,” she said in an interview with Us Weekly. “It’s about getting the kids up and fed, getting one to school, getting the other down for a nap, going to the grocery store, picking one up from school, getting the other one down for another nap, cooking dinner… I live my life at these two extremes. I’m either a full-time stay-at-home mom or a full-time actress.”

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3. Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie is so busy directing (Unbroken, By the Sea) and doing philanthropic work that it’s hard to believe she has time to be an actress and raise her six children, Shiloh, Vivienne, Maddox, Pax, Zahara and Knox (we’re guessing she has a lot of help from nannies and such). “I think I’m going to have to give up the acting as the kids hit the teenage years, anyway, too much to manage at home,” she admitted in an interview with Channel 4 News. “I have enjoyed being an actress. I am so grateful to the job and I have had great experiences…but f it went away tomorrow I would be very happy to be home with the children. I wake up in the morning as a mom and I turn on the news like everybody else and I see what’s happening and I want to be part of the world in a positive way.”

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2. Salma Hayek

Salma Hayek is still adding credits to her IMDB page, from acting work in Drunk Parents to producing The Prophet and Septembers of Shiraz, but she feels the impulse to focus on being a mom, especially since she had her daughter Valentina a bit later than some other actresses (she was 41 when her daughter was born). “I think if you are young and you have children, you still have so much to prove. When you have children later in life, you lose a bit of that urge for working,” she told Marie Claire magazine. “At the time, I was thinking, I can do another movie that may or may not work, or I can be with my child, nourish her, and not miss a moment of this precious time. And if my career is going to end in two years, what’s the difference, anyway?”

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1. Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow faced a lot of criticism when she claimed that regular moms who work “9-5” jobs have it easier than she does, because a regular routine is more conducive to motherhood than flying around to different cities to shoot and promote movies. Gwyneth has clearly lost touch and doesn’t understand the financial position she’s in, but she’s definitely altered her career strategy because of being a mom to Apple and Moses. “I’ve changed my movie career a lot since having children,” she said in an interview with InStyle magazine, admitting that she was “kind of quitting acting for three years to have kids and not really thinking about my career in that way.”