Kathleen Robertson says growing up Canadian helped protect her from the worst of child stardom
Kathleen Robertson, who began acting as a child in Hamilton before joining Beverly Hills, 90210, says growing up and working in Canada helped her navigate the transition into Hollywood celebrity.
Photo credit: Manfred Baumann.
Kathleen Robertson was 10 years old and living in Hamilton, Ont., when an open casting call came through her dance studio looking for a girl her age.
She already knew she wanted to act, although Hamilton in the 1980s was hardly an obvious launching point for a child with Hollywood ambitions. Robertson remembers telling people what she wanted to do and hearing some version of, “Yeah, good luck with that. You live in Hamilton.”
Then she got the job.
The film was Left Out, a National Film Board of Canada production about unemployment and its effects on a family, seen through the experience of a young girl. The NFB still lists Robertson among its cast, and the role became the beginning of a childhood spent working in Canadian film and television.
More than 40 years later, Robertson has been looking back at what happened after that first audition and at the role Canada played in the way she experienced child acting.
In a Sept. 10 interview with Tom Power on CBC’s Q, the Hamilton-born actor talked about beginning her career in Canada before eventually moving to Los Angeles and joining Beverly Hills, 90210. CBC framed the conversation around how being Canadian helped keep Robertson grounded as a young performer.
Robertson went on from Left Out to work in Canadian television, with early credits including The Campbells and My Secret Identity. She later landed the role of Tina Edison on Maniac Mansion, which ran for three seasons beginning in 1990. Joe Flaherty starred as her television father, Dr. Fred Edison, while Eugene Levy was among the series’ creators.
Robertson remembers being able to work professionally without making acting a large part of her identity at school.
“I always kind of would keep what I did on the D.L.,” she told Power. “I never told anybody I was an actor.”
Her classmates sometimes recognized her anyway. Robertson recalled people asking whether they had seen her on television, only for her to brush it off and tell them it wasn't her.
That experience is part of the distinction Robertson now draws between her own childhood in the Canadian industry and the celebrity culture that can surround young performers in the United States. She told Power that she believes her life could have gone differently had she grown up inside the American child-star system.
“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 is speaking about her own experience rather than describing the childhood of every young Canadian performer. She was able to spend years learning how to work on film and television sets while remaining relatively anonymous in her everyday life, and by the time Hollywood arrived, acting itself was already familiar territory.
The scale changed dramatically when Robertson joined Beverly Hills, 90210 as Clare Arnold in 1994.
She had been acting professionally for years by then, but 90210 brought a different kind of attention. In her conversation with Power, Robertson described the transition as one that took her from relative anonymity into recognition far beyond Canada.
Her path into 90210 also puts the Canadian portion of her career into perspective. Before arriving on one of the biggest youth-oriented American television series of the era, Robertson had already worked her way through an NFB film and several television productions in Canada. She had learned the routines of auditions, sets and long-running series without experiencing the same level of public attention that came later.
Robertson has continued working on both sides of the border in the decades since 90210, moving between acting, writing and producing. She is currently part of the Season 4 cast of Prime Video’s Reacher.
Her memories of Left Out are considerably less glamorous. Robertson told Power that the film was shown to students, although thankfully, as she remembers it, not to her own class.
She was already uncomfortable enough when classmates recognized her from television. When they asked if the girl they had seen was her, Robertson’s solution was straightforward: she told them it wasn’t.
