Many '90s kids will remember Amanda Bynes' turn in Nickelodeon's "All That." Her zany, attention-stealing energy was watchable enough to land her a sketch show of her own, fittingly called "The Amanda Show," and a lead role on "What I Like About You."
From there, she transitioned to film, picking up lead roles in "What a Girl Wants" (2003) and the teen Shakespeare film "She's the Man" (2006). She also appeared as part of the ensemble cast of "Hairspray" (2007), which made a tidy profit at the box office. In 2010, she played the gossipy, moralizing mean girl in "Easy A," another well-received teen literary adaptation, opposite Emma Stone.
Despite these apparent successes, Bynes tweeted in 2010, "If I don't love something anymore I stop doing it. I don't love acting anymore so I've stopped doing it." Just a month later, Bynes tweeted that she had "unretired." She then deleted her Twitter account altogether, only to get a new one.
These were the early signs of what became a long and highly publicized series of mental health episodes, including a string of DUIs and hit-and-runs, an arrest that involved her throwing a bong out of her 36th-floor Manhattan apartment (the charges were later dismissed), and a lot of very bad wigs.
She also accused her father of abuse only to recant this accusation in a bizarre tweet: "My dad never did any of those things... The microchip in my brain made me say those things but he's the one that ordered them to microchip me." She threatened a lot of people with a lot of lawsuits, reserving particular ire for any tabloid that claimed she was misusing drugs.
Finally, in 2013, Bynes entered rehab. In 2014, she tweeted that she had been diagnosed with bipolar and manic depression and that she was in treatment. Bynes seems to be on the mend. Although "Easy A" remains her last role, she revealed in a 2017 interview that she was three years sober and wanted to act again.
