These Exclusive Photos Of Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen Were Taken At The Height Of Their Acting Careers (2024)

There’s just no denying that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen still are the most famous twins to ever hit Hollywood, even though they’ve long since retired from the spotlight.

These lovely leading ladies entered the world on June 13th, 1986, in Sherman Oaks, California.

Sherman Oaks to Hollywood is about a 20-minute drive (give or take with traffic) so it wasn’t a long trip at all for their parents to start taking them on auditions.

Mary-Kate and Ashley landed their very first role when they were less than a year old. How crazy is that?

The twins co-starred as adorable Michelle Tanner in Full House (they split the role) and they were just 9 months old when they started playing her!

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While making appearances in Full House, the sisters started starring in movies alongside one another.

Their first movie came out in 1992. It was called To Grandmother’s House We Go, and it centered on the twins running away to their grandma’s house for Christmas in order to give their overworked mom a break.

The next year, they starred in Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, a Halloween movie where the girls attempt to lift a curse placed on their great-aunt.

In 1994, Mary-Kate and Ashley came out with How the West Was Fun,where they have a ton of adventures on a dude ranch.

When 1995 came around, it spelled the end of Full House. However, that was hardly the end of Mary-Kate and Ashley’s careers.

Things didn’t slow down one bit for the twins. In fact, they were just getting started.

The same year that Full House wrapped up, the girls made the movie called It Takes Two,which follows a nearly exact story to that of The Parent Trap.

A few years went by before Mary-Kate and Ashley completed their next projects; a movie and a TV series that both launched in 1998.

Billboard Dad was the name of the movie, and in it, the twins look to find their dad a new girlfriend after he ends up widowed.

Their TV series was called Two of a Kind. It was on ABC for 22 episodes and centered on Mary-Kate and Ashley being raised in Chicago by their widowed dad. A lot of widower plot lines there in 1998.

Next, these popular pre-teen powerhouses came out with Passport to Parisand Switching Goals in 1999.

Our Lips Are Sealed, Winning London, Holiday in the Sun, So Little Time, Getting There, When in Rome, The Challenge, and New York Minute all followed in the early 2000s.

That’s quite a number of movies to put out in a short amount of time!

After all of this, Mary-Kate and Ashley starred in a few things all on their own, instead of together.

But then, in 2012, Mary-Kate and Ashley made a joint decision to hang up their hats and officially retire from acting so they could really focus on their careers as fashion designers.

It was actually Ashley who made the step into the fashion industry in 2005 after she had the desire to create the ideal t-shirt, and the following year the duo came out with a whole collection.

It’s now been almost a decade since the twins have stopped acting.

While it doesn’t seem like they ever will be returning to the screen, it’s neat that they have gone on to build something else together in a whole new industry!