“Little House on the Prairie” star Melissa Gilbert “had to get out” of Hollywood after gaining fame as a child star.
Gilbert landed the role of Laura Ingalls Wilder at the age of 9, cementing her as a rising star.
“All of the pressures, I faced all of them,” Gilbert explained to People magazine. “When you live in Los Angeles, it’s like living at the mall when you work at the mall. Literally, everyone is in the business. When you walk into a restaurant, every head turns to see who walked in. Everybody’s always looking, curious, competing and that’s a really difficult thing, especially for a female actor. It puts a lot of pressure on staying thin and staying young, and really it makes it hard to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, because [of] the aging process.”
“No matter how much we push it downstream, it’s inevitable,” she continued. “So are you going to age comfortably and happily? Are you going to fight it, be unhealthy and feel like there’s something wrong with you for aging and that you’re defective because you’ve gotten older?”
Melissa Gilbert, photographed in 2009, left Los Angeles in 2013. (Getty Images)
Gilbert and her husband, actor Timothy Busfield, moved to Michigan in 2013. The actress spent the next years without Botox or facial fillers. She even had her breast implants removed in 2015.
The 60-year-old film producer emphasized aging is a “blessing.”
“I had to get out of there [L.A.], because it felt like I was not being authentically myself,” she told People. “In the five years that I was in Michigan, all of that stopped. … I stopped everything and just focused on being as physically and emotionally healthy as I could. And I think that shows, ‘Yes, I’m aging, but it’s not a curse — it’s a blessing.’”
Melissa Gilbert starred on “Little House on the Prairie.” (Ted Shepherd/NBCU Photo Bank)
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Melissa Gilbert and her husband Timothy Busfield moved to Michigan in 2013. (Bruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic)
In 2018, Gilbert and her husband bought a cottage in upstate New York.
The couple spent time fixing it up before moving in.
“We spent our first night there, once it was all clean, on a mattress on the floor in the living room,” Gilbert recalled in a 2022 interview with Fox News Digital. “We were waiting for the delivery of the fridge, the washing machine, the dishwasher and stove. I just remember thinking at that moment, ‘This is home. This is going to be our home.’ I think it was that night, that first night that we slept there, is when I realized, ‘Oh gosh, this is really it. And we’re going to be doing this ourselves. And it’s going to be incredible.'”
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Melissa Gilbert and her husband bought a cottage in upstate New York in 2018. (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
Gilbert admitted she does not miss Hollywood.
“I miss my relatives and friends in Los Angeles. I miss them terribly,” the “Tenure” star explained. “I wish I could see them more often. I’m hoping that as things gradually open up and we don’t go backward, I’ll continue to have the freedom to go visit them when I need to.”
“I was finally able to go see my mom late last summer. That was really impactful. I saw my kids and I saw my granddaughter in LA. I miss them. I miss my friends there,” she said.