'Matilda' star Mara Wilson remembers friend Michelle Trachtenberg: 'She was too young'

"Matilda" actress Mara Wilson is mourning the loss of her childhood friend Michelle Trachtenberg.

In an emotional Vulture essay on the "Harriet the Spy" star published Tuesday, Wilson paid tribute to Trachtenberg, who was found dead last month in a New York City apartment building at 39.

Wilson, 37, wrote that she met Trachtenberg during the 1997 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, where the Nick alum was "play-fighting" with "Jerry Maguire" star Jonathan Lipnicki.

"It stuck with me for a different reason: She was being nice to him," Wilson wrote in the piece titled "My Cool Friend Michelle." "Jonathan was five years younger than her, but she didn't treat him like an annoyance. I knew so many older girls who were mean to younger kids, but she wasn't, even when Jonathan was trying to slip an ice cube down the back of her shirt."

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The pair would see each other once again at the Audrey Hepburn Foundation's Hollywood for Children charity film festival months later. She affectionately added: "That's where I would find out it wasn't just me: Everybody fell in love with Michelle Trachtenberg."

Wilson, an outspoken advocate for child stars, wrote that their star-studded group of child actor friends included Trachtenberg's "Harriet the Spy" co-star Vanessa Lee Chester, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Rider Strong, Mae Whitman, Raven-Symoné and the sibling trio of Tia Mowry, Tamera Mowry and Tahj Mowry, among others.

"Last month, when I found out Michelle died, I was packing for a work trip. I looked at my phone and felt my stomach drop. My hands were shaking and my knees went weak — I thought I might pass out. I sat in a chair, and started to sob," Wilson wrote.

She continued: "This wasn't supposed to happen. She was too young. She'd worked too hard. I always thought I would get the chance to see her again, to tell her how much I'd always looked up to her. To tell her the times we spent together as children were some of the best of my life."

Mara Wilson says Michelle Trachtenberg was bullied about stardom

In her essay, Wilson recalled that Trachtenberg was bullied in school for being more famous than her classmates.

After seeing "less and less" of one another as they grew older, "something surprising happened" when Trachtenberg's family moved to Burbank, California, and the pair attended the same middle school.

"Surely, I thought, she’d be one of the beloved girls in school. But that didn't happen," Wilson said, adding that other kids bullied the actress because "there was always a lot of resentment toward the kids who'd 'made it.'"

Wilson said that shortly before Trachtenberg graduated in 1999, she pulled her aside for an emotional conversation, in which she asked Wilson if she was also targeted by their peers. "They never stop," Trachtenberg reportedly told Wilson.

"I had never seen Michelle cry before. I’d never seen her anything other than perfectly composed and confident," Wilson wrote. "It wasn't just that she was being bullied; it was that there wasn't any way she could get them not to hate her. So much of being a child actor is about making everyone happy. It felt cruelly ironic to be so hated when our raison d'être was getting people to like us."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mara Wilson mourns Michelle Trachtenberg death: 'She was too young'