In 1995, Jennifer Love Hewitt was 16 and suddenly everywhere thanks to Party of Five. Teen idol status came fast. Nearly 30 years later, at 46, she’s still clocking in, still landing roles, still refusing to fade out because someone decided her moment had passed. Hollywood keeps aging actresses out. She keeps showing up anyway.
Hewitt once summed it up perfectly in a July 2025 Vulture interview. “There are people that blow up and are hugely famous. And then there are those little warriors from the ’90s who just keep going.” She counts herself among the latter. “We’re steady little racehorses, and you can’t get rid of us.”
You’ve seen that stamina play out. From Barbie commercials to I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997, she jumped from TV sweetheart to horror final girl fast. The problem wasn’t the work. It was the noise around it. During a Tonight Show appearance at 16, Jay Leno asked about her dating life, then looked disappointed when she revealed her age. “Nobody was saying, ‘Don’t talk to women like that. Don’t talk to little girls like that,’” Hewitt later said. Instead of praise for her acting, she got reduced to body commentary. “It was just ‘boob, boob, boob’ everywhere.”
She kept booking roles anyway. Can’t Hardly Wait. Heartbreakers. Two Last Summer movies. She also kept singing, releasing albums through the late ’90s and early 2000s. Her final studio album, BareNaked in 2002, mattered because she co-wrote most of it. “When I’m singing, I just get to be me,” she told UPI. Acting paid the bills. Music kept her sane.
TV gave her a second wind. Ghost Whisperer ran five seasons and earned her a Saturn Award in 2007. “Surviving the business has been my biggest role,” she later said. That perspective matters when you’re still standing decades later.
Motherhood slowed things down by choice. She and Brian Hallisay welcomed daughter Autumn in 2013, son Atticus in 2015, and son Aidan in 2021. She returned with 9-1-1 in 2018, older, sharper, and less interested in approval. “I needed to be a person for a while,” she said in 2018. You can feel that confidence now.
At the July 14, 2025 I Know What You Did Last Summer premiere in Los Angeles, Hewitt walked her first major red carpet in years. Social media predictably fixated on her body. She pushed back months earlier. “People seem to have a really hard time accepting that … I don’t look that way anymore,” she told Fox News in December 2024. On her 46th birthday, she posted, “No make up and no filter.”
In 2011, when Jennifer Love Hewitt was 32, she landed The Lost Valentine for Hallmark. What she really got was Betty White.
A few days ago, the 46-year-old actress looked back on that season and didn’t hold back. “Betty was very special to me because growing up, my grandmother was my best friend, and I would sleep over at her house all the time, and our favorite show to watch together was The Golden Girls,” she told People. That wasn’t nostalgia talking. It shaped her. “I fully believe that that’s why I’m part 95-year-old as just a person because I literally grew up watching Rose and Blanche and Dorothy and Sophia.”
When she heard White, then 89, would co-star, reality blurred. “Oh my gosh, not only am I going to get to work with her, but this is my grandmother.”
White, who died in 2021 at 99, delivered. “She was just everything I wanted her to be and times a million.” Some full-circle moments actually work out.
Jennifer Love Hewitt currently stars as dispatcher Maddie Han on ABC’s 9-1-1. “In February, it will be 37 years for me in this business,” Hewitt told me during our new Zoom conversation. “This is the longest-running show I’ve ever been on. Even though I’ve been on ones that went for a while, this is still the longest-running one. With TV and the business the way that it is today, I’m really grateful to have an awesome job with great people that I love and I get to learn from every day.”
RELATED: Tami Stronach Looks Beautiful 41 Years After The NeverEnding Story Made Her a Star
