Cameron Diaz’s Explanation For ‘Retirement’ In Her 40s Couldn’t Be More Pure 

Ever since Cameron Diaz had her bangs sticking straight up in “There’s Something About Mary,” I’ve been a fan. I loved her in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” and she made me want to kick some ass after seeing her in “Charlie’s Angels.”

My all-time favorite movie of hers is “The Holiday” though. I went to the theater to see it twice, I’ve watched more than I’ve watched any movie ever because she’s so lovable, and hello, the wardrobe of hers in that movie is still epic fifteen years later. She’s one of those actresses who makes you fall in love with them over and over again, and I’ll forever be a fan.

Of course when she announced her retirement after her role in the remake of “Annie,” which came out in 2014, I was sad. Honestly though, I didn’t think she truly meant it. How many other actresses or singers announce they are going to retire, only to have a comeback movie or tour.

I’ll just wait for her to come back, I thought.

But after seeing her latest interview with Kevin Hart on his show “Hart to Heart,” where she gets candid about the reason she decided to step away from the acting world, I don’t think we will be seeing her show off her acting skills anytime soon.

Cameron Diaz explains to Hart that she was putting everything she had into her career and acting, which left her zero energy for anything else in her life — saying there were aspects she “wasn’t even touching,” because she was always putting the focus on her work.

Diaz says she began thinking differently around the time she turned 40 and her priorities shifted. As a woman in her 40s, I totally get this. You begin to realize what makes you feel at peace and happy and it very rarely has anything to do with how much you work or how much money you make.

It also sounds like Diaz was suffering from burnout and decided she wanted to take her life back. She told Hart that because of her demanding schedule, there were things she wasn’t able to tend to and so, she was sourcing it out. Further proof that there’s no such thing as having or doing it all. You can now see her on her Instagram page writing, cooking, drinking wine, and living her best life.

So many times we look at celebrities, or some random stranger on Instagram who has a million followers and we think they have it all figured out and are racing around doing one-hundred times the work that we are. They aren’t; they are getting help and oftentimes letting big parts of their life go.

After retiring, Diaz met and married her husband Benji Madden, and the couple had a baby, Dax, in 2019. “All of those things I didn’t have time for before and didn’t have the space to make the right decisions for me at the time to bring that in,” Cameron Diaz told Yahoo!Entertainment.

Even though Diaz had a huge career starring in several movies, and was (and still is) one of the best known actresses, she says her life at home with her family is more fulfilling and she finally feels “whole.”

“Now I’m here and this is the most fulfilling thing that I’ve ever done in my life. [To] have a family and be married and have our little nucleus of a family. It’s just completely the best thing. So, I can’t give…I don’t have what it takes to make a movie that needs to be made. All of my energy is here,” she said for an interview with Yahoo Finance Presents.

Whether you are a fan of Cameron Diaz and her movies or not, you can’t help but love her honestly about life after being a movie star. She’s saying it was a great time in her life and she loved (and still loves) acting, but she was ready to give it all up in order to feel more fulfilled and do things that really matter to her, like being able to be present with her family.

If that’s not a great message and proof that fame, fortune, and a huge career isn’t the answer to being happy, I don’t know what is.