Where Is Hillary Wolf Now?

By CelebPaid Editorial Team · 9 min read

Illustrative image of an Olympic judo competition. Hillary Wolf, who played Megan McCallister in Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2 (1992), left acting after 1992 and went on to compete in judo at the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games.Illustrative image via Wikimedia Commons

The Role: Megan McCallister in Home Alone

Born Hillary Jocelyn Wolf on February 7, 1977, in Chicago, Illinois, she began acting as a small child in the mid-1980s, racking up television credits before most kids her age had learned to ride a bike. Her early work included television films such as Murder Ordained in 1987 and a starring turn as the lead character Laura Chartoff in the 1992 feature Big Girls Don't Cry... They Get Even. But the role that made her face recognizable in households everywhere was Megan McCallister, the eldest of the McCallister children, in Home Alone. Released in 1990, the Christmas comedy became a genuine cultural phenomenon, and Wolf returned for the sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, in 1992. Playing Kevin's bossy but ultimately caring big sister, she held her own in an ensemble of young performers, and the two films together cemented her place in holiday-movie history. Remarkably, the 1992 sequel would be the last film she ever appeared in. Her listed years as an actress run from 1984 to 1992, an eight-year career that ended just as she entered her mid-teens.

Trading Scripts for the Judo Mat

Most child actors who quit the business fade into ordinary life, but Wolf traded one demanding discipline for another. While still a teenager, she devoted herself to judo, a sport she had trained in alongside her acting work, and she turned out to be genuinely world-class at it. In 1994, at seventeen, she won the junior world judo championship, making history as the first American ever to claim that title. It was an extraordinary achievement that had nothing to do with Hollywood: years of predawn training sessions, strict weight management, and international competition against the best young fighters on the planet. The victory announced her as a serious senior-level prospect for the United States, and it set up the second act of her public life. Where her acting career had been built on being directed by others, her judo career was built on discipline she imposed on herself, and she rose through the national rankings with the same focus she had once brought to memorizing lines.

Two Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000

Wolf's judo career peaked on the biggest stage in sports. She earned a place on the United States Olympic team and competed at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, fighting in the women's 48 kg division, where she advanced to the quarterfinals. Four years later she did it again, qualifying for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, this time in the women's 52 kg division, where she went out in the first round. Competing at two separate Olympic Games, four years apart, is a mark of rare longevity in a brutal weight-class combat sport, and it places her in a tiny fraternity of performers who reached the elite level in two completely different fields. Few people on earth can say they starred in one of the most beloved family films ever made and also wore the USA uniform at the Olympics. After Sydney, she stepped away from international competition, closing the book on an athletic career that had carried her from film sets to the Olympic mat in less than a decade.

Family Life and the Rocky Mountain Wrestling Club

In 2002, Wolf married Chris Saba, himself a high-level wrestler and a two-time Olympic alternate, and she took the name Hillary Saba. The couple settled in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a city known as a hub for Olympic and amateur sports, and raised two sons, Michael, born in 2007, and Dylan, born in 2010. In 2004, the couple founded the Rocky Mountain Wrestling Club in Colorado Springs, pouring their competitive experience into coaching the next generation of grapplers. Years later, Wolf added author to her resume with the 2017 parenting book The Not So Zen Mom: Parenting Strategies for Survival, a candid and funny look at raising kids after a childhood spent in the spotlight and on the mat. In December 2021, she wrote a personal essay for Newsweek reflecting on Home Alone co-star Catherine O'Hara, a rare public reminiscence that reminded fans how fondly she regards that chapter of her life even though she chose to leave it behind.

Hollywood by Day, Dojo by Night

What makes Wolf's story so unusual is that her two careers did not happen in sequence so much as in parallel. She was training in judo while she was still booking acting roles, which means that during the years most people remember her as Megan McCallister, she was also spending evenings and weekends on the mat, learning throws, pins, and the grueling conditioning that combat sports demand. Child acting is often described as an all-consuming machine, yet Wolf was building a second identity in a windowless dojo at the same time she was memorizing lines on film sets. That dual track explains how she could walk away from Hollywood at fifteen and win a junior world championship at seventeen: the athletic foundation was already years deep by the time the cameras stopped rolling. It also reframes the usual child-star narrative. She did not quit acting and then scramble to find herself; she quit acting because she had already found something harder, something that measured her by what her body and mind could do rather than how she looked on camera. Teammates and coaches in the judo world knew her as a fighter first, and the discipline of the sport, with its rituals of respect and its unforgiving honesty about effort, gave her a structure that many former child performers spend decades searching for.

Where Is Hillary Wolf Now?

Today, Hillary Saba lives a deliberately quiet life in Colorado Springs with her husband and two sons, far from the entertainment industry she left behind more than three decades ago. She has not acted since 1992 and has given only a handful of interviews about her unusual double career, preferring to let the work speak for itself: a memorable run as Megan McCallister in two of the most-watched family films of all time, a junior world judo title in 1994, and two Olympic appearances in 1996 and 2000. Her story remains one of the most remarkable pivots in child-star history, not a cautionary tale but a case study in reinvention. While reunion specials and anniversary retrospectives occasionally pull her back into the conversation, she has shown no interest in returning to acting, and her public footprint stays limited to family, coaching, and the occasional written reflection on a childhood split between Hollywood soundstages and judo dojos.

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