Melissa Gilbert had to ”get out” of Hollywood after childhood stardom.
The 60-year-old actress starred on the NBC Western series Little House on the Prairie as a child and continued to work throughout the 1980s and 1990s but eventually had to leave Los Angeles because of the “pressures” she had faced over the years.
She told People: “All of the pressures, I faced all of them. 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 ageing process.
“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 ageing and that you’re defective because you’ve gotten older?
