Melissa Gilbert will always cherish Little House on the Prairie -- but that doesn't mean she's literally Laura Ingalls Wilder.
On the July 8 episode of The Patrick LabyorSheaux with Patrick Labyorteaux, Gilbert, 61, spoke to Labyorteaux, who played Andy Garvey on Little House, about her time on the series, which ran from 1974 to 1983 (with three post-series TV films).
Labyorteaux, 59, noted that during that time, if celebrities weren't in the tabloids, fans "believed" someone was just like they were on television. "So here you are, America's sweetheart, literally. Maybe a few years ago, they let you take the pigtails out, but now you're 19, you're a real-life woman, and you're out in Hollywood," he told Gilbert, and asked if it was "difficult" for her to have "real-life relationships" in which people "didn't expect" her "to be Laura."
"It was weird," Gilbert confessed. "I think people still, almost into my 40s, always kind of half expected a 12-year-old to come in with a fishing pole [and in] gingham. And that, at that time, to me, felt like a weakness."
Gilbert said ultimately she learned how to make it a "strength" for her because there was a "shock factor" when people realized, "She's a full-grown adult with opinions and ideas that are smart and work."
"It was something that I used to my advantage certainly later on," she said. Gilbert noted that child actors have "two ways we grow up." "We either grow up super sheltered and don't know how to do things like wash dishes or super overexposed and exploited," she said, adding the second group usually has "the big problems."
Gilbert fell into the first group, she said. She told Labyorteaux that at age 22, she moved to New York City when she landed a part in an Off-Broadway play. It "terrified' her, she said, but also helped her finish growing up.
"There I was at 22, living on my own with my cat and my dog in New York City. And completely unprepared to live on my own entirely. Completely," she explained. "When I moved to New York was when the rubber really met the road, and I had to figure out how to do so much stuff that I had no clue about. Like, I didn't realize that you could break a $100 bill at a bodega, and you didn't have to go to a bank. It's little things like that. I actually, at one point, let the dishes pile up in my sink so bad, and I didn’t have a dishwasher, so I threw them out and bought new dishes. On my $700 a week salary at that point."
Labyorteaux also reflected on how Little House kept its child stars grounded and happy because there were so many of them. "All the kids that I keep talking to from the '70s acting always wanted to be on Little House mainly because there was a bunch of kids on the show. It wasn't just one kid amongst a bunch of adults and so I think that helped us," he said.
"Our set was as kid-friendly as a set could be at that time," Gilbert said. "Even with all the adult shenanigans going on, we were sort of protected from a lot of that. I didn't know half the stuff that the grown-ups were doing until they started writing books about it."