Jennifer Love Hewitt became a household name in 1995 when Party of Five turned her into a teen idol at just 16. Nearly 30 years later, at 46, she’s still here, still working, and still giving Hollywood mild panic because she refuses to disappear quietly.
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.”
Here’s the practical takeaway. Careers last when you ignore timelines that weren’t made for you. Jennifer Love Hewitt didn’t freeze herself in 1997. She kept moving. That’s why she still matters.
RELATED: Tami Stronach Looks Beautiful 41 Years After The NeverEnding Story Made Her a Star
