For eight years, Melissa Gilbert played the sweet, braid-wearing Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie.
But off-screen, Melissa's Gilbert's life was a far cry from that of a farmer's daughter.
She was a child star who grew up a lot differently than most. For instance, she had three nose jobs before she was 20 and rebelled hard during her teen years!
She was only nine when she started playing Laura from 1974 to 1982.
Since she was a child star, she doesn't remember too much from that time other than it being a fun time.
"And be in those fantastic clothes and button up boots and I don’t remember it ever not being fun.”
Being a nine-year-old actress with a lot of lines on a show is a lot of work.
This led her co-star and the show's lead, Michael Landon, to yell at her about it.
He showed a much tender side from there as he calmed her down, ran through her lines, and then hugged her when she got them down.
She never missed her lines after that!
“By child-actor standards, mine was probably the best experience that you could have,” she told Today.
“I had a fairly grounded home life. In fact, I was the opposite of what you would expect a child star to be: I was a total dork."
After being a self-professed "dork" for so long, she told Today that she rebelled as a way to "test the waters."
This led her down a road of drugs, alcohol, and sex.
The actress often says that she doesn't have a family tree since she was adopted a day after birth by actors Barbara Crane and Paul Gilbert.
Sadly, the truth of her biological father's passing was always hidden from her.
This news hit the actress so hard that she told Oprah that she took antidepressants “for a while” as she couldn’t eat or sleep for “about six months.”
In 2012, the actress competed on the show's 12th season where she and her partner, Maksim Chmerkovskiy, finished in fifth place.
"This is exactly what I wanted," she told The Hollywood Reporter before competing.
She sustained a bad back injury when she was on tour with Little House on the Prairie musical.
She told People that she would fight through the pain for the sake of production.
She underwent her first surgery to fix her back in 2010.
No sisterly love here!
Melissa reported in her autobiography, Prairie Tale, that it was because Melissa, known as Missy on set, was very aloof and cold.
If you remember, he played Laura’s nemesis’ little brother. Like Gilbert, he was adopted by actors Barbara Crane and Paul Gilbert.
Sadly, according to Gilbert's autobiography, they are no longer in touch.
She's the biological child of Barbara Cowan and Harold Abeles.
You may recognize her from her roles on Roseanne, The Conners, and The Big Bang Theory where she starred alongside Johnny Galecki.
Since Gilbert had grown close to Landon's family off-screen, she was devastated when she learned that Landon and his wife were splitting up.
And since Gilbert had seen Landon flirt with the makeup artist that he was leaving his wife for, she was incredibly hurt.
In an essay for Today, the actress shared how common plastic surgery was while growing up in a Hollywood family.
"In my family growing up, it was just a given that everybody got a nose job, and there was not even a discussion," she wrote.
The pair started dating when she was 17.
“I fell instantly, hopelessly and stupidly in love,” she wrote in her memoir. “We went from first date to instant couple. I felt like I was starving for Rob.”
When Melissa got pregnant, they broke up since Rob wasn't ready to be a father.
As if that wasn't bad enough, she soon tragically suffered a miscarriage.
