It's A Wonderful Life

Classic Christmas movie It's A Wonderful Life has a happy ending.

But it's taken Karolyn Grimes, who played six-year-old Zuzu in the film, years to get over the heartbreak and pain of her own life and find peace.

Now 74, the former actress has opened up to KOMO-TV in an interview posted on the Seattle, Washington-based TV station's website on Monday.

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My how she's grown: Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu in It's A Wonderful Life, has opened up about her years of pain. She's pictured at a 2011 screening of the classic at the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences 

'It's all in how you look at your life, because no one has a wonderful life. But you can make it what you want it to be,' Karolyn said in her own message of hope.

The blonde, who was six when she appeared in Frank Capra's 1946 movie, had lost both parents by the time she was 15.

She married young, divorced, and suffered the pain of nursing her second husband through cancer until his own death in 1994. Her 18-year-old son committed suicide in 1989.

Film family: The blonde, who played little Zuzu, cuddled her onscreen father James Stewart in Frank Capra's 1946 Christmas classic 

'He was a good kid,' Karolyn told KOMO-TV, and she was haunted by guilt. 'I chose to face it. Feel it. And release it. I did the best I could.'

Ironically, in the film, James Stewart plays a family man, George Bailey, who is saved from suicide when an angel shows him how awful the world would be without him.

Many years later, the film is keeping Karolyn busy with personal appearances at big-screen showings of It's a Wonderful Life worldwide plus interviews for TV, radio, print and new media. NBC will screen the movie on Christmas Eve.

Amazingly, she didn't actually see It's A Wonderful Life until she was an adult and journalists began to come to her Kansas home asking to speak to her. 'I thought, "You know what? I think I'm gonna have to sit down and watch this movie." I'd never seen it. I was 40 years old!"

Now she deals with a lot of fan mail at her home in Port Orchard, Washington. 

'The letters I get are just incredible,' she said. 'They love the movie, they thank me for being in the movie. What a great gift I've been given. And I don't take it for granted, I really don't.

'It has put me on a path,' she said. 'I am no longer Karolyn, so much as I really am Zuzu.'

Movie, what movie?: The 74-year-old admitted that she didn't see It's A Wonderful Like until she was in her 40s

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2529010/Karolyn-Grimes-opens-years-family-heartbreak-appearing-Christmas-classic-movie-Its-A-Wonderful-Life-child.html#ixzz2oV1sAtQ8
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