Thora Birch was a rising star set for an A-List career. Then, her father got involved.

In the 90s and 2000s, Thora Birch was a household name for millennial women like myself.

As a child, she scored a breakout role in 1993's Hocus Pocus, and went on to star in all the movies we watched on repeat at sleepovers growing up, from Monkey Trouble when we were kids, to Now and Then when we were tweens, to edgier, more adult films like American Beauty and Ghost World when we hit our teenage years.

Now, Birch is readying herself for a comeback in Kristen Stewart's directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16.

Based on Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir of the same name, The Chronology of Water follows Lidia (played by Imogen Poots), an Olympic swimming hopeful who flees her abusive home when she wins a scholarship to a Texas school. But trauma runs deep, and Lidia seems destined to repeat the cycle of addiction, until literature shows her that trauma can be transformed into art.

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While there isn't much information available about Birch's role yet, Deadline has described the film as "an in-depth exploration of sexuality, of creativity, an unflinching stare at all the gory details of having a female body and a sensitive depiction of the emotional vocabulary of youth".

But where has Thora Birch been for all these years, and why did she disappear from the spotlight so suddenly?

Thora Birch's career trajectory.

The daughter of two adult film stars, Jack Birch and Carol Connors, Thora Birch was named after the Norse god Thor, and got her Hollywood break with a Quaker Oats commercial when she was just four years old.

Quickly, she began booking roles, and by six, she was making her film debut in the 1988 sci-fi comedy Purple People Eater, which earned Birch her first Young Artist Award.

The early-to-mid 90s saw Birch's career take off, as she scored roles in action-thriller films like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, as well as some of the roles she's best known for, like Dani in Hocus Pocus and Teeny in Now and Then. She also picked up two more Young Artist Awards, for Hocus Pocus and Paradise in 1992 and 1994.

Watch the trailer for Now and Then. Article continues below.

1999 saw her star rise to new heights, as she was cast as Jane Burnham in American Beauty. Sam Mendes' film became a major award-season player, and eventually picked up five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For her role in the film, Birch was nominated for a BAFTA, and shared in the Screen Actors Guild win for Best Ensemble.

Aside from the notable misstep that was the 2000 film adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons, a critically-panned box-office flop, Birch's career was steadily on the rise, and in 2001, she bounced back with the Ghost World. A critical darling, Ghost World didn't make much of an impact at the box office, but Birch earned career-best reviews for her performance, and even picked up a Golden Globe nomination for the role.

At the time, it seemed Birch was one of the generation's child stars to watch. But unlike her Ghost World co-star Scarlett Johansson, Birch's career stalled shortly after the film.

As Johansson went on to critical acclaim in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation in 2003, Birch marked the year with a Limp Bizkit music video and a television movie titled Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story. As Johansson's career sky-rocketed critically and commercially through the 2000s and 2010s, Birch's career seemed doomed to television movies and low-budget horror films.

In fact, the most notable works on her resume since Ghost World are a nine-episode stint on the tenth season of The Walking Dead and the Lifetime Original film, The Gabby Petito Story, which marked Birch's directorial debut.

So… what happened?

In 2010, Birch was set to star in an off-Broadway production of Dracula, that is, until she was fired just weeks before the show was set to debut in January 2011.

The reason for her firing? Her father Jack Birch, who was also her manager.

Speaking to ABC News in the US, Dracula director Paul Alexander alleged that Jack Birch had threatened one of his daughter's co-stars, which prompted Alexander to fire Birch.

As Alexander told it, Birch's father had taken issue with the unnamed co-star when he saw the actor rubbing Birch's back during a scene. When the actor tried to explain that he was just following Alexander's direction for the scene, Jack Birch allegedly replied, "Listen, man, I'm trying to make this easier on you — don't touch her."

Jack Birch was an ever-present presence on the set of Dracula. Alexander said that although he'd found it "odd", it wasn't much of an issue until the incident took place.

Noting that Birch's father looked "a bit like Freddy Krueger with sunglasses — which he never takes off, by the way" and that he was built like a "body builder", Alexander said that he interpreted Jack's words as a threat. Shortly after, he fired Birch from the production.

"I had to let her go for the safety of my cast and crew," he said. "It's unfortunate because Thora's performance would have been an extremely interesting and innovative performance to watch — that's why I hired her in the first place."

In a statement to the New York Times, Jack Birch denied making the statement, and said that he had simply spoken up because his daughter had been "a little uncomfortable on stage because an actor kept rubbing her back"."I was trying to convey Thora's discomfort," he added. "In no way was I making a threat."

Meanwhile, Birch herself said that she was "blindsided" by her firing.

"I'm totally in a state of shock over this, I still can't believe it," she said at the time. "My dad is my support, and he is the best support that I could ever have," she added.

But it wasn't the first time that Jack Birch's presence on set had caused a stir.

Three years prior, in 2007, a source had spoken to the New York Post about an incident that allegedly occurred on the set of The Winter of Frozen Dreams.

Birch, then 25, was set to film a sex scene with Dean Winters, who was 42 at the time. According to the source, Jack Birch was again ever-present on set throughout filming, and insisted on watching his daughter film the explicit scene with Winters.

Describing Jack Birch as looking like "Charles Manson", but wearing a "full-length leather coat and wraparound sunglasses, even at night", the source told the Post that the whole thing was "so wrong".

"It was the most bizarre, perverse scene," the source said, before adding that a camera issue meant that they had to shoot 14 takes of the scene. "One girl on the crew broke down crying."

"The director is saying, 'Harder! Faster!' and the father is giving Winters the thumbs up," they added.

The source also recalled Jack Birch "threatening to kill the assistant directors" and to "pull [Thora] from the movie with three days of shooting left".

But in 2014, four years after the Dracula firing, Birch spoke to The Guardian about her absence from Hollywood, and seemed to have a slightly different opinion about why she disappeared.

Speaking to Hadley Freeman, Birch initially said that she had "decided to take a break and live [her] life, branch out a little, educate [herself]". But Freeman wrote that within the same conversation, Birch contradicted her own explanation for her absence.

"When I make the mistake of suggesting [Birch] 'stepped back', she snaps: 'It makes me angry when you use that phrase because I didn't step back. I was always working, it's just that no one was paying attention,'" Freeman wrote.

Describing herself as "mouthy", Birch put her departure down to a lack of willingness to "shut up", and an unwillingness to fall in line with Hollywood beauty standards.

"I just felt like I was making people angry, because I wouldn't wear the frilly bows. I just didn't take advice and I think people got pissed off at me for not taking advice."

And when asked about her Dracula firing, and her father's role in it, Birch paused and looked down.

Skirting the issue of her father, she said, "I pissed a lot of people off over a long period of time and they found a way to upset me, hoping that upset would bring a change in my behaviour. Like a distancing… But I'm done, I'm done. People wanted me to be not fine. A lot of it was bulls**t."

Feature image: New Line Cinema / Getty Images