Melissa Gilbert had to "get out" of Hollywood after childhood stardom.
Melissa Gilbert had to get out of Hollywood after finding fame as a child
The 60-year-old actress starred on the NBC Western series 'Little House on the Prairie' as a child and continued to work throughout the 1980s and 1990s but eventually had to leave Los Angeles because of the "pressures" she had faced over the years.
She told People: "All of the pressures, I faced all of them. 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.
"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?”.
"I had to get out of there [L.A.], because it felt like I was not being authentically myself."
The 'Diary of Anne Frank' actress - who is now married to Timothy Busfield but has son Dakota, 35, with her first husband Bo Brinkman and 28-year-old Michael with her second husband Bruce Boxleitner - eventually moved to Michigan and explained that all of her worries immediately subsided following her departure from the Californian city.
She said: "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'."