‘Little House on the Prairie’ star Melissa Gilbert reveals why she ditched Hollywood: ‘Had to get out of there’
nypost.com“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?”Gilbert and her husband, actor Timothy Busfield, moved to Michigan in 2013.
Read more on nypost.com