By Mallory Mattingly
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE actress Melissa Gilbert revealed that her birth father knew who she was after watching her on the show.
“I didn’t tell him who I was, and then he asked me, ‘Well, who are you? What do you do?’” she told co-star Patrick Labyorteaux on his podcast. “And I said, ‘Well, here’s the thing.’ And I said, ‘Did you ever watch LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE?’ And he said, ‘You’re Laura, aren’t you? I knew it.’ He knew it.”
She got in touch with him in 1989 following the birth of her son Dakota.
“He could see,” she revealed. “And when I met my half-siblings, we all looked alike. So you could definitely see it…It’s pretty clear.”
Like Gilbert, Labyorteaux, who played Andrew “Andy” Garvey on the LITTLE HOUSE series, had a similar adoption story. However, he never got the chance to meet his mother because she died before he could find her.
“I never met her, but I met her family, who was a stepfamily,” Labyorteaux explained. “She had three kids that she had inherited from the husband that she married. So, she had three kids, but they weren’t her biological kids. She only had one biological kid… They would watch LITTLE HOUSE and when I would show up…because of my eyes, they would go, ‘Oh, that’s probably your kid.’ And they would make fun of her like that…They were right.”
Gilbert was adopted by actors Barbara Cowan and Paul Gilbert at a young age. Her biological parents were also in the entertainment industry. Her “birth mother was an exotic dancer and her father was a stock car racer and musician,” per Fox News Digital.
“It was pretty clear that it was in me,” Gilbert said of her entertainment gene. “… All the kids are performers on both sides of that family. So it was genetic and environmental.”
Related: LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE Reboot Casts Ingalls Family
“They were each married to other people and had three children each and ran off together and conceived me on a motorcycle trip in the desert,” she said of her birth parents. “Explains a lot. And then they left their spouses for each other and got married after [getting] pregnant with me and moved all the kids in, so I was number seven. So, the decision was made to put me up for adoption.”
Now, decades later, the actress is reflecting on what she wants from life now that she’s over 60.
“I’m having a very self-reflective day today. Actually, the last couple of days. I’ve come to the realization that I need to embrace my strengths, my knowledge and my power as an accomplished woman. As a consequence, I’ve also come to realize all that I will no longer tolerate. This realization has been, not only liberating but has given me a whole new inspiration of what I want this last third of my life to be,” Gilbert wrote on Instagram recently.
Though many decades have passed since LITTLE HOUSE first aired, it has continued to impact its stars and fans alike.
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