Dave Olsen and Jarnette Olsen
Dave Olsen never expected his daughters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to enter show business.
“I didn’t even want to bother with it,” the golfer-turned-real estate professional told The Washington Post in 1991. The paper reported that his then-wife, former ballerina Jarnette Olsen, provided photos of the twins to a talent agency at the recommendation of a friend. “I said, ‘Honey, if you want to do this, that’s fine.'”
Mary-Kate and Ashley started playing Michelle Tanner on Full House when she was nine months old. Although the 90s sitcom was a huge success, they didn’t feel pressured by their parents to become stars. “We were lucky not to have those types of parents,” Ashley said on The Late Show in 2004.
Dave and Janet helped manage Mary-Kate and Ashley’s finances, including their wealth from their media and merchandise empire Dual Star, until they turned 18. “You can imagine the stacks of notes I get every day regarding all these contracts,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. But they didn’t do it alone.
Her sister Elizabeth Olsen told the Guardian in 2012: “My parents had very little to do with the sisters’ work, at least after they got their first jobs. They always did everything they could to connect them to the right people who could handle things, whether it was being a child actor, managing their assets, or running a production company, but they never pretended they could do it well themselves.”
Jarnette and Dave divorced in the mid-’90s, and he remarried Mackenzie Olsen.
