Melissa Gilbert is best known for starring in much-loved TV show ‘Little House on the Prairie’.
The then 10-year-old actress played the role of Laura Ingalls Wilder in the 200 plus episodes of the show which portrayed the idyllic existence of a family living on a farm in 1870s Minnesota.
But behind the scenes the rising star had anything but an idyllic family existence, revealing in her memoir that it was full of secrets.
When the actress was born in 1964 LA, California, her birth parents were too involved in their careers to raise her and she was given up for adoption.
She was told her mom Kathy Wood was a prima ballerina and her father, David, had been a Rhodes Scholar. She was also told they were newly engaged.
The now 57-year-old later discovered her mother was a dancer and not a prima ballerina and her father was a stock car racer and sign painter. But this wasn’t the only untruth she discovered about her birth story.
After she was given up Gilbert found her forever home 48 hours later with Barbara Crane and Paul Gilbert and was given the new name of Melissa Gilbert. They later adopted a son, Jonathan, who co-starred on “Little House on the Prairie.”
Paul was a stand-up comic, actor, and dancer but started as an aerialist with a family circus from Buenos Aires and Barbara had enjoyed a short-lived career as an actress.
Her parents didn’t hide the fact that she was adopted but the story surrounding her beginnings proved full of twists and turns.
Gilbert’s parents divorced when she was 8 years old and her mother remarried and had a daughter Sara Rebecca Abeles, the actress known professionally as Sara Gilbert, who found fame on the sitcom “Roseanne”.
When Melissa was old enough, she found out the real truth about her biological parents. Kathy was a dancer, but she wasn’t a prima ballerina, and her father was a stock car racer and sign painter.
She also later found out that Kathy and David were “both married to other people. They each had three children. They ran off together, got pregnant, moved in together with six children, and decided they couldn’t afford a seventh,” she revealed in her memoir Prairie Tale, where she also admitted her whole life had been an “illusion.”
A few days after her stepfather died family and friends had gathered at her mother’s house and her godmother Mitzi was describing the moment her parents first picked Melissa up from the hospital. Melissa recalled her mother then saying: “Well, imagine what a shock it was for me! I mean, we had no plans to adopt a child.
“We weren’t even looking,” she continued. “Then I got a phone call that there was a baby available and did I want it?” She turned to me. “I called your dad. He was on the road and he said, ‘Yes, that’s the one. Go get it.’”
Melissa voiced her concern at being referred to as ‘it’.
“Well, actually, you weren’t even born yet,” her mother assured her.
Melissa said she wasn’t able to explore the many questions she had following her mom’s admissions but when she did find a good moment to query what had been said her mother told her that she and her father had been struggling to conceive but at that point hadn’t considered adoption.
The former child star accepted that response but later realized that it just threw up further questions about her childhood.
“My father had a daughter from a previous marriage. I’d met her once. And my mother was pregnant twice after me, once with a baby she lost at six months and once with my sister Sara.
“Both of my parents were fertile. So why couldn’t they — Obviously more was going on than I knew. Once again, the beginning of my life was defined by a question mark.”
It’s clear that the inconsistent stories she was given about her beginnings threw many other things in her life into doubt.
She has overcome a lot to finally find love and happiness with her third husband and has two children who she’s close to.
