NEED TO KNOW
Melissa Gilbert’s family tried to keep her life as normal as they could amid her Little House on the Prairie fame.
Gilbert, 61, was the latest guest on the Hey Dude… The 90s Called! podcast, hosted by Christine Taylor and David Lasher. In the Tuesday, June 3 episode, Gilbert recalled getting the role of Laura Ingalls and how her parents tried to keep her life normal despite her star rising.
As the hosts discussed the popularity of the show, Gilbert admitted it was “weird” being so widely known at such a young age. She was just 9 when she started playing Laura.
“Little House went off the air, I think, with 20 million viewers or something. It’s just unheard of these days,” she shared.
NBC Television/Courtesy of Getty
Gilbert continued to say she was “pretty lucky” she was able to keep a degree of normalcy in the face of such popularity.
“I didn’t have a lot of incidents. They kept me very sheltered from a lot of that stuff.” However, “there were a couple of moments,” she added.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
“One time I was walking in New York City with my mom right at the height of Little House and I had my hair in pigtails for some reason, which I didn’t do in public after this. And I got mobbed,” Gilbert recalled.
“And someone grabbed a chunk of my hair out, and it’s like The Beatles, screaming, mobbing. I was, I don’t know, 11 or 12 maybe. That was scary. So from then on, we took precautions to keep me kind of under wraps a little bit more.”
Gilbert was also sheltered from much of her fan mail. “I didn’t see any of that stuff until I was considerably older, which is a good thing because there was some creepy fan mail … a lot of fan mail from prison, a men’s prison.”
NBCU Photo Bank
“They didn’t want me to see that stuff,” she said of her parents, who were still happy to do “a lot of Hollywood things, like affiliates, dinners and presentations and interviews and talk shows and all that stuff.”
“My life was … they tried to — my mom especially — tried to keep it as unaffected by that as possible,” she shared.
“I still had chores when I came home,” she added. “I still had to empty the dishwasher, babysit my sister [actress Sara Gilbert], cleaned up after the dog.”
