Known best for portraying Laura Ingalls Wilder on “Little House on the Prairie,” Melissa Gilbert grew up in the spotlight. Decades later, the spotlight was beginning to exact a toll.
Gilbert recently spoke with Fox News Digital about how she was becoming obsessed with looking youthful after a surge in popularity during the ‘80s. From dating Rob Lowe then to competing on “Dancing with the Stars” 30 years later, she spent decades in front of cameras. It’s no surprise, then, that coming to terms with aging would begin with a look in the mirror.
“I was living in Los Angeles, and I did not recognize who I was. I had overfilled my face and my lips,” she told Fox’s Stephanie Nolasco. “My forehead didn’t move. I was still dyeing my hair red. I was driving a Mustang convertible. I was a size two in an unhealthy way. I looked like a frozen version of my younger self, and that’s not who I was.”
“I was stuck,” she said. “I could feel myself fighting it. And I said to myself, ‘It’s time to age.’ I had to leave Los Angeles to do that — not Hollywood — Los Angeles specifically.”
After marrying actor Timothy Busfield in 2013, the couple moved to Michigan to get away from it all.
Gilbert spent the next five years getting comfortable with growing older.
“I stop coloring my hair,” she said. “I had (my) breast implants removed. I decided to just be the best, healthiest version of myself without this pressure to look a certain way, and it paid off in a huge way. I finally found my feet as a woman, fully 100% strong in my own knowledge, in my own accomplishments. Everything got easier. And a bonus? I have a lot more free time not staring in a mirror, sitting in a dermatologist’s chair, or sitting in a hair chair.”
In 2019, Gilbert and her husband bought a cottage in the Catskill Mountains, where she said she enjoyed spending time with her “nine extraordinary grandchildren.”
The 60-year-old now has her own lifestyle brand, Modern Prairie, that’s designed to help older women “support one another as we go through all the incredible changes we are experiencing at this phase in our lives, both physically and emotionally.”
“It’s remarkable,” Gilbert added. “I love being this age. There are things about it that are not a lot of fun. I don’t like it when my ankles ache in the morning or my skin’s drier. Aging is not for sissies, but it is certainly better than the alternative. And I’ve never felt better in my skin.”
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