Tami Stronach was 10 when she filmed The NeverEnding Story. Grown men camped outside her house.

There are two scenes that stay with you when you watch 1984's iconic kids' film The NeverEnding Story - one, the scene where Atreyu's horse, Artax, sinks into the Swamp of Sadness (dear god, the TRAUMA), and two, the scene where the Childlike Empress pleads with Bastian to say her name in order to save Fantasia.

"Call my name! Bastian! Please! Save us!"

Even typing that gave me the shivers.

Watch the heart-wrenching scene from The NeverEnding Story below. Post continues.

The child actors in The NeverEnding Story are phenomenal, arguably none more so than the Childlike Empress, played by 10-year-old Tami Stronach.

After all, if you can appear in just three minutes of a film and yet become unforgettable, then I'd say you're doing something right.

But after the popular movie was released 39 years ago, Stronach disappeared from our screens. So what happened to her, and where is she now? 

Stronach beat out Poltergeist's Heather O'Rourke to nab the role.

As a young child, Stronach lived in Iran, where her Scottish father and Israeli mother met and married (after 48 hours!). In 1979, the family had to move to Tel Aviv in Israel after the Iranian Revolution. From there, they moved to the UK, before settling in Berkeley, California.

It was here that Stronach excelled. She threw herself into musical theatre classes and was actually on stage performing when a casting agent for The NeverEnding Story saw her and asked her to audition.

Stronach arrived at the audition in "piglet makeup" because she was rehearsing a play. "I showed up at the audition with really heavy grease paint and big black lines on my face," she told Vice in 2021.

"Everybody else looked really polished. I think I had an advantage in that I was just completely naïve. I had no idea what I was auditioning for."

The audition process was gruelling, requiring numerous rounds. In the end, she won the role over several other young actors, including Poltergeist's Heather O'Rourke (O'Rourke died in 1988, aged just 12).

Stronach and her mother flew to Bavaria in Germany, where they remained for three months while The NeverEnding Story was filmed.

"We shot in chronological order, and by the time I came back to do my second scene, my real teeth had grown in a lot. So, [director Wolfgang Petersen] was like, 'Just don't smile. Just do little gummy smiles, a little lift of the lips.' You can see in the second scene, my mouth significantly shrinks in size," she revealed.

The tears you see on Stronach's face in her scenes are real. As is her distinct accent at that time, which came from living in Iran, Israel, the UK, and the US.

Fellow child actors Barret Oliver, who played Bastian, and Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu, lived in the same hotel as Stronach during filming. Their schedules kept them apart most of the time, but they still found time to say hello.

"We'd go up and down the stairs and knock on each other's doors," she said. "I'd be like, 'Hey, Barret, whatcha doing?' And he’d be like, 'I'm playing with my army men.' And I'd be like, 'Alright, I'll see you later.'"

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She became a pop star... sort of.

To promote the film, the young actors appeared on a number of German talk shows during production. The 1979 book that the film was based on was very popular in the country.

One of the talk show hosts asked Stronach if she had learned any German, to which she replied that she only knew the song '99 Luftballoons'. She sang it live on the show, and a music producer reached out the next day with a record deal.

As Stronach and her mum were leaving for the US in just three days, the producer wrote the songs overnight and they recorded it the day after. Then the day before her flight out, Stronach starred in the music video.

"It was insane," Stronach said. "And then literally that was it. We didn't change the ticket."

Listen to the latest episode of The Spill, Mamamia's entertainment podcast. Post continues below. 

Delusional grown men sexualised a very young Stronach. 

While Stronach loved acting, she hated the price that came with fame. "I did not desperately want to be a star. I desperately wanted to act. Those are two different things," she told Vice.

By the time The NeverEnding Story came out, the young actor was just 11 years old. That didn't stop adult men from "tracking down her address and camping outside her family's house". She even received an engagement ring from a German man in the mail and producers offered her a role in a nude film.

"They came to our house and pitched it, and I'm like, I'm not doing a nude film. I'm not Lolita," she said.

Stronach revealed that her parents weren't "equipped to be managers" and ultimately it was decided that she would no longer pursue an acting career.

As the years went by, she didn't talk about her iconic role and it "just kind of melted away."

Many years later, Stronach interviewed Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown at a fan convention. It's easy to draw parallels between Brown and Stronach, who were (and in Brown's case, still are) highly sexualised by grown men. Yet Stronach maintains that Brown has handled the fame much better than she ever could.

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"Somebody jumped up in the middle of the convention and ran to the stage and gave her a wedding ring," she said. "And she was so much cooler than I was at 10. She just was like, 'Well, thanks.' And that was it."

On the other hand, when a young Stronach was sent an engagement ring, she asked someone who was travelling to Germany to give it back to the owner.

"I felt so guilty," she admitted. "I took everything way too seriously and really to heart. I wonder if there could have been a way to not be as freaked out."

She's now a mother... and she's starring in a new film.

Stronach spent 20 years as a dancer in New York. She met and married actor/writer Greg Steinbruner and they have a daughter together, Maya, who is now 12 years old.

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The couple launched their own entertainment business, The Paper Canoe Company, which is focused on children's theatre, film, and education. With renewed interest in The NeverEnding Story after Netflix's Stranger Things featured the movie's theme song in one of their episodes, Stronach and her husband decided to create a 1980s fantasy film themselves.

The film is called Man & Witch and is currently in post-production. Alongside Stronach and Steinbruner, the cast also features an impressive line-up of 80s and 90s acting icons: Back to the Future's Christopher Lloyd, The Goonies' Sean Astin, and the always fantastic Shohreh Aghdashloo. The pair's daughter Maya is also starring in the movie, and Stronach has no qualms if Maya would like to pursue the acting career she did not.

After all these years, the 50-year-old still sometimes catches up with her The NeverEnding Story co-star Hathaway on the convention circuit. And she is now ready to carve her own path once more.

"For nearly 40 years I've gotten letters from all over the world asking 'will you ever be in another movie?' Thank you for wanting that to happen. Thank you for writing. Thank you for waiting. For wondering," she wrote on Instagram.

"I'm ready if you are. Yes."

Feature image: Warner Bros.

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