Best known for her role as Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House on the Prairie series, actress Melissa Gilbert has opened up about her new role in theater and what it means to “act her age.”

Gilbert grew up on camera, starting at the age of two, when she appeared in Alpo dog food commercials. This landed her first TV series at nine, Little House on the Prairie, where she played her Minnesota farm girl character from 1974 to 1984.

Gilbert is taking a break from the camera and performing in the Off-Broadway play Still, which began running at Manhattan’s Sheen Center on Feb. 5.

Still focuses on the older couple Helen and Mark, who broke up 30 years ago and reunite for a special dinner only to find that their political difference may be too big of a barrier for them.

Gilbert reflected on her feelings about the story to The Observer, “One of the things that drew me to this play is the idea of having a romance at this age. Just because we’ve gotten older doesn’t mean we don’t fall in love and have passionate, physical relationships. I think older people have more value. They have lived more and experienced more, they’re wiser, they are the ones you should look to.”

Among Gilbert’s other roles over the last 58 years, she served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, appeared on Dancing with the Stars and voiced Batgirl in Batman: The Animated Series. She also wrote a cookbook, a children’s book, and a memoir of her time on Little House on the Prairie.

Still marks a particularly meaningful project for her as she is specifically playing a woman later in life, instead of falling prey to the societal expectation that actresses should not age. 

She recently revealed that during the decades she spent in front of cameras, she developed an obsession with appearing young.

“I was living in Los Angeles, and I did not recognize who I was. I had overfilled my face and my lips,” she told Fox News. “My forehead didn’t move. I was still dying my hair red. I was driving a Mustang convertible. I was a size two in an unhealthy way. I looked like a frozen version of my younger self, and that’s not who I was. I was stuck…I could feel myself fight it, and I said to myself, it’s time to age. I had to leave Los Angeles to do that – not Hollywood – Los Angeles specifically.”

Gilbert went on to explain the process of returning to her true self. “I stop coloring my hair,” she recalled. “I had [my] breast implants removed. I decided to just be the best, healthiest version of myself without this pressure to look a certain way, and it paid off in a huge way. I finally found my feet as a woman, fully 100% strong in my own knowledge, in my own accomplishments. Everything got easier. And a bonus? I have a lot more free time not staring in a mirror, sitting in a dermatologist’s chair, or sitting in a hair chair.”

Still is now playing at  The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, 18 Bleecker Street, NYC.

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Article by Baila Eve Zisman

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