Little House On The Prairie star Melissa Gilbert used to be a mainstay in Hollywood. But she had to get out of the state as she got older. In 2013, she and her husband moved to Michigan. She also decided to remove any Botox or fillers.
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"All of the pressures, I faced all of them," Gilbert explained to 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. 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."
Gilbert starred as Laura Ingalls on Little House On The Prairie as a child. As she got older, she decided to embrace aging.
"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?"
'Little House On The Prairie' Star Talks Leaving Hollywood
Ultimately, the Little House on the Prairie star said she left Los Angeles because she wanted to live her authentic self. She said she had to get away from the pressure and focus on being healthy.
"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.'"
In 2018, the couple moved from Michigan to New York. They purchased a cottage in upstate.
"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.'"
