The youngest cast member of Tim Allen’s popular 1990s sitcom has led an extremely tumultuous life.

Taran Noah Smith starred as Mark Taylor on ABC’s Home Improvement for its entire massively successful eight-season run. However, when the TV comedy series ended in 1999, Smith decided he had no desire to continue acting, and walked away from showbiz. Unfortunately, his turbulent private life would be splashed across tabloid headlines for many years after he left our screens.

Home Improvement was the show that made comedian Tim Allen a household name. It was one of the most-watched sitcoms of the 1990s and launched the career of future Baywatch sex symbol Pamela Anderson. The three young actors who played Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor’s sons Brad, Randy and Mark (Zachery Ty Bryan, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Taran Noah Smith) were also catapulted to stardom.

The three boys had very distinct personalities. Brad was a popular jock but wasn’t very bright and always wound up in trouble. Middle brother Randy was the intelligent one, but he was also a quick-witted know-all. As played by Smith, Mark was more sensitive than his older brothers and was regularly teased by them.

Over the course of the eight seasons, Mark grew from a wide-eyed six-year-old into a teenager who adopted a gothic look in Season Seven due to feeling like an outcast. He shared his closest familial bond with his mother Jill. In the last season, however, he did manage to bond with oldest brother Brad, when Randy left the family home for Costa Rica.

The part of Mark Taylor was Smith’s first substantial screen role. But he had actually been modeling from his infancy. In a 2016 interview with website Headlines & Global News, his mother Candy Bennici revealed, “At 6 months old, he was in a crib with a matching outfit and sheets, and that was his first job.”

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Bennici’s daughter, then seven years old, was also working in the modeling industry. Smith, her baby brother, had been brought along by his mother to a talent agency meeting and the agent told Bennici that there was work available for her baby. These baby modeling gigs eventually led to him acting in some television commercials.

Bennici said that both her children would only be booked for a small number of jobs per year; usually no more than four. But when Smith acted in an Enterprise car rental commercial, things took off. Based on this job, Bennici got him a Screen Actors Guild card, which made him part of the labor union for working film and television actors.

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When he and his family first went out to Los Angeles looking for acting work, Smith said they were very naïve about the business. Happily, however, they had inadvertently arrived at the best time possible for an actor: “pilot season”. This is the four-month period between January and April in which television networks produce 70-100 “pilot episodes” of prospective new shows.

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In the same interview with Headlines & Global News, Smith said his family, “didn’t even know there was a thing called pilot season.” He remarked on how lucky they got, considering Home Improvement was only his third audition. Fatefully, the second audition was for a show that wound up being cancelled after one season, so he felt lucky not to have been chosen for that role.

It sounds like the ultimate dream for many actors. Smith landed a main role in a series that became a television institution, and he did it on only his third audition. However, as Bennici later told the Marin Independent Journal newspaper, “You go in so naïve.” She signed her young son to a seven-year contract despite admitting, “I had no idea what that contract meant.”

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Smith has always talked about his time on the show in very positive terms. Regarding his experience of spending his childhood years on the Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California, he said, “I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I had a wonderful time.” It seemed the problems truly manifested themselves once the show had ended.

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Bennici said that, with the show no longer part of her son’s life, “he had the hardest time.” He was suddenly torn away from his high-profile job and all the relationships he’d forged. Crucially, though, she believed he struggled because it was all he’d ever known, as both an actor and a person.

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“The adults and the other kids had a life before the show,” she lamented to the Marin Independent Journal, “but his whole life as he knew it was suddenly gone overnight. They take your ID card and you can’t go on the lot any more.” Smith went from being one of the stars of a beloved TV show to a 16-year-old who was unsure where his future lay.

Smith did a guest spot on 7th Heaven and appeared in a TV movie entitled Ebbie while Home Improvement was still on the air. He then lent his voice to an episode of Batman Beyond in 1999 but quit acting soon after. He told Headlines & Global News, “by the time I was 16 or 17, I just wanted to do other things.”

He continued by saying, “I really enjoy working with my hands and working with tools and having something physical to look at and say that I built at the end of the day.” Acting simply wasn’t what made him happy any more, and he wanted to find out what would put a smile on his face. Sadly, though, hard times lay just around the corner for Smith and his family.

Smith initially believed that perhaps he could be happy working in a different area of the film/television business. Therefore, he attended the film school at the University Of Southern California to study directing. He soon met vegan chef Heidi Van Pelt, who hosted dinner parties for Hollywood clients in her home, and the two became an item.

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However, Smith was reluctant to tell his parents about his relationship with Van Pelt, and with good reason. “She was 15 years older than me,” he said in 2015, while taking part in the Marin Independent Journal interview promoting his mother’s film industry guidebook for parents, Stardom Happens: Nurturing Your Child In The Entertainment Business.

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He admitted, “I knew my parents would not be excited by that, so I told them she was nine years older, the same distance as my parents in age.” But even though he tried hard to keep the true age difference a secret, his parents eventually found out. “That’s when they tried to push her out of my life,” he said.

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By this point, however, Smith was a teenager who had fallen head over heels in love. He was never going to listen to his parents’ objections and wound up leaving his university course. He then ran away to be with Van Pelt and would only have contact with his family again when he sued them, at age 17, for access to his $1.5 million trust fund.

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He and Van Pelt hired a lawyer who drafted a written statement which said that the couple were married. The pair thought this would help their case as they tried to persuade a judge to declare Smith an emancipated minor, i.e. free from his parent’s control. That way they could access the trust fund a year early, instead of waiting until he turned 18.

Smith even accused his parents of mismanaging his money by living off it, instead of leaving it untouched in the trust fund. In the 2015 interview with mother and son, Bennici took great offense at this accusation. “Of course, we didn’t touch his money,” she said.

She continued by saying, “It was in a trust fund. We couldn’t have touched it if we wanted to.” She maintained that her son and his much older partner were simply trying to get at his money too early saying, “We were trying to protect it. Luckily the Marin courts were very good about it and didn’t give it to them.”

The Marin Independent Journal contacted Van Pelt, who now owns vegan restaurant Fud in her hometown of Kansas City, to get her side of the story. She was adamant that she had never received any of the trust fund money. “There was no usurping of anyone’s money. I’ve always had my own thing and my own strengths. I don’t rely on others.”

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She did reveal that it had been her idea to fabricate their marriage in the legal affidavit. She said that Smith was worried his parents would try to get him arrested for running away while he was still a minor. She revealed, “He didn’t have a job and was running out of money. The only way he could get money was to try to access his trust fund.”

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Smith did eventually gain access to his trust fund when he turned 18. He later told Headlines & Global News, “Shortly after that, we started to talk and be more of a family.” He believed that what he went through with his family was common, “teenage-angst-driven strife” that had been exacerbated by his fame and the media cycle.

By this point, Smith had already controversially married Van Pelt in a secret ceremony in 2001, while he was still 17. Then, in 2005, they founded a vegan dairy products company named PlayFood. They ran the business from their home in Sherman Oaks in the suburbs of Los Angeles; this, however, was against regulations, and it was soon shut down by the authorities.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Smith said he had begun to have doubts about the relationship by this point. “I was with Heidi for five or six years,” he told the Marin Independent Journal. “At the end of that, I realized I had made a mistake.” Ironically, he said this period was when his parents were finally ready to accept Van Pelt as part of their family.

There would be no need for this acceptance, as Smith told his parents that he and Van Pelt had broken up. They quickly filed for divorce in February 2007. Smith said he apologized to his parents for his “teenage phase”, and luckily, “they were very forgiving and apologized too.”

The Sherman Oaks house, out of which Smith and Van Pelt had run PlayFood, was listed on the market in 2007. But it soon became infamous due to an exposé by tabloid news website TMZ detailing the dilapidated condition in which Smith and Van Pelt had left it. The house was listed for sale with no photographs, but the listing admitted it was, “the worst house in a prime location.”

TMZ posted a video that detailed the levels of damage that had been inflicted upon the interior of the house. Graffiti and other bizarre pieces of hand drawn “art” covered the walls, several of which had large holes in them. Cupboard doors hung off their hinges. It was a sorry sight to behold.

On one wall, which was practically falling apart, the words, “Please view this lesson in finality. Thank you,” were scrawled. Smith’s lawyer spoke to TMZ at the time and tried to deflect blame from him by saying, “You can thank his gold-digging ex-wife for the debacle he’s in.” There can be no mistaking the lawyer was implying Van Pelt was responsible for the damage.

In a 2007 interview with The National Enquirer newspaper, however, Smith felt others were to blame for the destruction. He said, “Squatters have been living there. I have a lot of artist friends and they spray-painted the walls.” Either way, Smith would spend the next several years in court, battling with his ex-wife for control of PlayFood.

Smith’s name would again be plastered across the headlines in 2012 when he was arrested for driving under the influence, as well as drug possession. He was stopped around 1:00 a.m. on January 30th in Los Angeles County and police believed he had been taking marijuana. He also allegedly had hashish in his car.

Thankfully, despite this arrest, it does seem like Smith has gotten his life back on track in recent years. He told Headlines & Global News in 2016 that he had been working as an installation artist at museums and art festivals. Prior to that he had spent much of 2014 providing disaster relief in the Philippines while working for charity Communitere.

He helped build a resource center which housed tools to enable the locals to rebuild their lives. They provided, “everything from sledgehammers to a 3-D printer and a laser cutter.” He added, “My official title was Maker Space Maker because my job was to set up the shop and create the system that made everything go.”

He also started his own on-the-water art display space, The FairWeather Gallery. He saw this as his way of uniting the passions of his parents in a project which he could call his own. He said in the 2016 interview, “My dad is a boat builder, and my mom studied art history and is much more of an artist, so I’m combining the two in my life.”

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Smith seemed to be indulging his father’s side of his heritage when his name hit the headlines again in July 2019. A submarine had been docked at Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey Bay, California, and locals had no idea where it had come from, what its purpose was or who owned it. In the end, TV channel Action News 8 discovered that Smith was the owner of the sub!

“No, we are not smuggling drugs, we are not attacking the U.S., we are just all Californians having a good time,” Smith told the SFGate website. Smith elaborated by saying the vessel had been manufactured for the Swedish Navy and he had purchased it in Florida. He was now teaching trainees how to pilot the sub.

Working with the company Community Submersibles, Smith was instructing students on how to dive down to 600 feet beneath the waves. He said that learning to pilot a submarine seemed perfectly natural to him. After all, he had been born on a boat and raised with the ocean as a major part of his life.

Smith reunited with the cast of Home Improvement for an Entertainment Weekly magazine photoshoot in 2011, but he said has no plans to return to acting. “I’ve moved on to do other things with my life,” he told the Marin Independent Journal. He said he also fully supported his mother’s efforts to help other showbiz parents and their children navigate the business “in a safer manner.”