Peter Ostrum was born in Dallas, Texas in 1957, but spent a significant part of his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Cleveland that he began acting professionally, appearing in children's theater productions at the Cleveland Playhouse. The story goes that sometime in 1970, talent scouts from Paramount scoured children's theaters looking for potential actors to play the five central children in the film adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The 12-year-old Ostrum was asked to pose for several Polaroids and was recorded reading portions of Dahl's book into a tape recorder. He also sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee" as a testament to his singing abilities. The pictures and footage were then flown to New York and shown to the film's producers. Ostrum was perfect and beat out many, many other kids for the role of Charlie Bucket. His stage experience gave him an advantage. "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (retitled to emphasize the film's Crazy Chocolate starring Gene Wilder) was filmed in Germany in the late 1970s and released in the United States on June 30, 1971.

Willy Wonka was critically acclaimed. Roger Ebert gave it four starscomparing it favorably to The Wizard of Oz. However, it was not a huge success in theaters, and in fact faded into obscurity for many years. It wasn't until Paramount's distribution rights lapsed and Warner Bros bought the film in the 1980s that it became more popular. WB ran "Willy Wonka" heavily on TV and, when the VHS market exploded, distributed the film widely. A new generation discovered it and it became a popular cult sensation.

Although it's considered a success story, 12-year-old Peter Ostrum probably wasn't happy that his movie made it to the box office. Ostrum has given many interviews about his Willy Wonka days. and how his career stalled when he was still in high school.

In a 2000 interview with NPROstrum said Willy Wonka's job was as an exchange student because he had to keep up with his studies while living in Germany for about three months. He even witnessed the early construction of the Olympic Park, built for the then 1972 Olympic Games. He kept one of the boards from the film as a souvenir. Overall, filming Willy Wonka was a good time. In the 2023 documentary Remembering Gene Wilder, Ostrum talked about how fun it was to work with Wilder, as he struggled to talk to the child actors and treat them like fellow professionals.

Before it was published, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory looked like a potential hit for Paramount (strange thought, considering how weird the movie is). Ostrum performed the film so well that David L. Wolper of Paramount offered him a three-picture deal, thinking he had found a bankable new child star. However, Ostrum declined the offer. Even at his age, he understood that contracts sealed actors into certain projects and preferred the idea of ​​choosing which films to work on and when. Ostrum instead went back to school to study.

Ostrum continued to audition for stage roles, but never seemed to gain any traction. Willy Wonka was kind of a bomb, so it didn't do much for his career. By the time Ostrum was about 17 and no further major opportunities presented themselves, he retired from acting. Ostrum did not like the spotlight, refused many interviews and avoided "Willy Wonka", preferring to talk about anything else. For years he even told people that he wasn't the one in Willy Wonka, but his brother. In an interview with NPR, Ostrum admitted that he even kept his role a secret from his wife. It wasn't until he was about to meet his wife's mother for the first time that he brought it up. He wanted a normal job.

After Ostrum retired from acting, he turned to a new passion: veterinary medicine. Ostrum's family bought a horse when he was still a teenager, and the young man was very impressed by the veterinarian who came to care for the animal. After high school, Ostrum took a gap year and moved to Pennsylvania to apply for a job at the Delaware Horse Center, which involved grooming horses. Ostrum was at a crossroads; he could go back to California and pursue acting as a young adult, or he could go to school and become a veterinarian. He decided to do the latter. In 1984 He received his doctorate in veterinary medicine from Cornell.

Dr. Ostrum spent most of his medical career caring for cows and horses, operating at the Countryside Veterinary Clinic in New York. The now 67-year-old Ostrum has been retired from his practice for a year. He has been caring for animals for a long time and living his true passion. He has two children with his wife Loretta.

Over the years, Dr. Ostrum has occasionally acknowledged his presence in Willy Wonka at the Chocolate Factory. In 2013, he and some of his colleagues at Wonka. appeared as a judge on an episode of Top Chef: Just Desserts. He spoke on several DVD releases of Willy Wonka, making his face more visible now that the film has become a cult phenomenon. He occasionally parlays his fame into lucrative promotional deals; once helped Dunkin' Donuts with a promotion that included free train tickets in Massachusetts.

Dr. Ostrum, it seems, always lived the way he wanted. And those occasional $10 royalty checks will always remind him of the movie he made when he was 12.