If sharing interesting fun facts about ourselves was a competition, Hillary Wolf Saba would win in most rooms.
Her go-to fun fact is a plenty impressive one: She competed in the 1996 and 2000 Summer Olympics in judo.
Even if someone else could trump the Olympian thing, Saba would still have a big card left to play.
For a long time, though, the Colorado Springs woman didn’t want to show that one.
It’s not like she could hide it.
Every year around Christmas, her face could be spotted anywhere where there are televisions. In the beloved “Home Alone” movies, a young Saba plays Megan McCallister, the older sister of Macaulay Culkin’s star character.
Of several notable roles during her years as a child actor, “Home Alone” remains her most famous.
It’s why podcast hosts and reporters have steadily reached out to Saba asking for interviews.
“There’s always been interest every single year to do press stuff,” she said. “It still happens 31 years later, if you can believe it.”
In the past, she’s always declined to talk about it. That goes for longtime friends who never knew Saba’s background on the big screen. That also goes for strangers who would correctly recognize Saba from a movie. She’d laugh it off and say, “No, I wasn’t in a movie.”
“I was never super motivated to talk about it,” Saba said. “So I stayed quiet about that part of my life.”
But her name still pops up online each December, when the holiday classic from 1990 relentlessly comes back into the spotlight and prompts a flurry of “where are they now” cast stories.
Hillary Wolf Saba, right, is pictured with actress Catherine O'Hara, who played the matriarch in "Home Alone."
Scrolling past updates about Catherine O’Hara, who played the McCallister family’s matriarch, starring in “Schitt’s Creek” and the latest on Culkin’s acting career, there’s Saba’s comparatively lesser- known name.
And there are details about the, comparatively, much different path she took.
The Chicago native never sought out to be a movie star. A family friend in the movie business noticed something special in 5-year-old Saba, who was more outgoing than most kids and had a deeper, scratchier voice than most little girls.
Her mom reluctantly got headshots made. Within a month, Saba got her first role in a TV movie called “A Matter of Principle” with Alan Arkin, playing one of his daughters. Other roles followed.
“It’s something I just fell into,” Saba says. “It’s weird as a child actor. Once you get a part and show that you can act professional and are cute, the work keeps coming.”
Along with the first and second “Home Alone” movies, Saba was the main character in a 1991 movie called, “Big Girls Don’t Cry ... They Get Even.”
She describes these years in a surprisingly normal way. She and her family stayed in Chicago, and she only took jobs that didn’t involve much traveling or time off from school.
But her childhood memories aren’t like the rest of us. She met famous people like Michael Jackson and hung out with childhood actors while a bodyguard chaperoned them. Her first kiss was with a guy named Shane, the older brother of Macaulay Culkin.
“I can see now just how totally unique my childhood was,” Saba said. “Once I got out of the business, I think I knew, ‘Wow, I’ve had a really weird kind of beginning of my life.’”
What came next was unique, too.
While Saba was making movies, she was also making waves in the sport of judo. Since first trying it out at the age of 7, she fell in love with the form of Japanese martial art.
When she started competing, she rarely lost.
A big win came at the age of 14. She won the U.S. National Judo Championships in Hawaii, beating out women who were twice her age.
She quickly set her eyes on Olympic-sized dreams. That meant deciding to retire from acting as a teenager.
“Most kids were dying to be successful actors, and I didn’t have that desire,” Saba said. “It was just something I did. I learned at a young age that I didn’t want that lifestyle as an adult.”
Instead, she wanted to see how far she could go with athletics. She met some of those goals by competing in two Olympics.
She met other goals by being able to live a life outside of the spotlight, the kind of life her younger self knew she wanted.
She’s never wanted to go back to acting.
Hillary Wolf Saba quit acting to pursue her Olympic dreams.
“I’ve never regretted that choice to quit the movie business,” Saba said. “People have asked me that over the years and the answer is literally zero times.”
Her training brought her to Colorado Springs, where she stayed for college and to start a family. After she and her husband, Chris, had their first of two sons, Saba spent years as a stay-at-home mom.
For most of those years, she rarely talked about her chapter in the movie business.
“I’m an open person and wear my heart on my sleeve, so not sharing something like that is kind of out of character for me,” she said. “I had some weird thing about it.”
She preferred to be known as an Olympian, something she put all of her passion and hard work into and not a child actor, something she didn’t necessarily chase.
“I wanted to be known for my accomplishments as an athlete and never wanted to get attention for being an actor,” she said.
Time has shifted how Saba sees it.
“I think when you’re younger, you want to be like everybody else,” she said. “That’s what your 40s are for… embracing your uniqueness.”
Her uniqueness involves a unique pairing of experiences.
“I don’t think there are many child actors that ended up being Olympians,” she said. “I know that’s what makes me, me. Movies and Olympics.”
Last May of 2021, she started a new chapter as the director of events and volunteers at Pikes Peak United Way. The following December, she shared her story with Newsweek, which ran an article titled, “‘I Was in ‘Home Alone’ 1 and 2, Then I Became an Olympian.”
“I’m so glad I was able to let go of caring what people think, because in the past five years it’s become a fun thing to share,” the story reads.
She’s had fun watching the movie with her friends and family in recent years. She enjoys the “look of joy and shock” when she tells friends she was in “Home Alone.” At work meetings, bringing up the fun fact brings “levity to the conversation,” she said.
In simply sharing her story, she can make people smile. The residual checks from the movies make her smile, too.
In retrospect, Saba knows why she downplayed her past. But she won’t do that in the future, after learning this lesson: There’s a way to be proud of your accomplishments without being boastful.
“I’m thrilled to be able to call myself an Olympian always, because I feel like I earned it,” she said. “I can say I earned the acting stuff, too.”
This story was originally published on Jan. 25, 2022.
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