‘Little House On The Prairie’ Star Details Her ‘Escape’ From Hollywood: ‘I Had To Get Out Of There’

“Little House on the Prairie” star Melissa Gilbert recently discussed moving away from Hollywood more than a decade ago after realizing its negative impact on her life.

The 60-year-old actress, who played Laura Ingalls Wilder on the series starting when she was 9, said she was getting excessive attention in Tinseltown. 

“All of the pressures, I faced all of them,” Gilbert said in an interview with People. “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.” 

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She added, “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.”

The actress said L.A.’s obsession with looking young was part of the problem.

“No matter how much we push it downstream, it’s inevitable,” Gilbert 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?”

She discussed moving to Michigan in 2013 with her husband Timothy Busfield and halting cosmetic procedures, like Botox, and even had her breast implants removed. The former child star stressed how living outside the Hollywood bubble has been a liberating experience.

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“I had to get out of there [L.A.], because it felt like I was not being authentically myself,” Gilbert told the outlet. “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.’”