Dave Olsen and Jarnette Olsen
Dave Olsen never expected daughters Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen to enter show business.
“I didn’t even want to be bothered with it,” the golfer-turned-real-estate-professional shared in 1991 with The Washington Post—which noted his then-wife, former ballerina Jarnette Olsen, gave a talent agency a photo of their twins at the suggestion of a friend. “I said, ‘Honey, if you want to do this, fine.'”
Mary-Kate and Ashley began playing Michelle Tanner on Full House when they were 9 months old. While the ’90s sitcom was a huge success, they didn’t feel pressured by their mom and dad to be stars—with Ashley noting on The Late Show in 2004 “we’re lucky that we never had those types of parents.”
Dave and Jarnette helped manage Mary-Kate and Ashley’s finances, including their riches from their media and merchandise empire Dualstar, before they turned 18. “You can imagine the mountains of memos I receive on a daily basis on all these contracts,” he told the L.A. Times in 2000. But they didn’t do it alone.
“My parents had very little to do with my sisters’ job really, at least not after getting them that first job,” sister Elizabeth Olsen told The Guardian in 2012. “They always did what they could to hook them up with the right people to handle things, like being child stars and managing assets and running production companies and so on, but they never pretended they could do it well themselves.”
Jarnette and Dave divorced in the mid-90s, and he remarried McKenzie Olsen.