Melissa Gilbert became famous in the 1970s when she played Laura Ingalls on it Toilet on the Moor. The popular series, starring Michael Landon, was popular with viewers for a decade.
In her 2009 memoir, Prairie story, Gilbert revealed the sometimes grim reality of growing up as a child star – and moving into a state of mindfulness. One of Gilbert’s most memorable stories from autobiography told everything about a mother and another young star her age: Jodie Foster.
Saw Gilbert Foster on a trip to Paris with her mother
Gilbert took her mother – who was deeply involved, for better and worse, into her daughter ‘s life and career – on her first trip to Europe in the early 1980s. But sharing a hotel room in Paris and phoning her friends and boyfriend from the hotel lobby for a bit of privacy became a chore for Gilbert, who was then a late teenager.
Fortunately, he saw Gilbert Foster filming a movie while walking the streets of Paris one day. Foster – who is two years younger than Gilbert – asked her to hang out that night. The Toilet on the Moor star jump at the chance to spend some time with someone around her age.
“I accepted it immediately, and with a sense of relief approached a despair that might have frightened Jodie into reconsidering her offer,” Gilbert admitted in Prairie story. “Fortunately, it didn’t.”
Gilbert was dating Rob Lowe at the time
Gilbert defended Foster, saying the actress was a close friend of hers and that her sexual side was “irregular” with her. “She’s an amazing man,” Gilbert recalled telling his mother.
In addition, Gilbert reminded her mother, she was in a long-term relationship with Rob Lowe. The two were suddenly in love – and maybe even a little also infatuated with each other, she admitted.
“I am a very heterosexual woman,” said the Toilet on the Moor star named. “In fact, maybe too heterosexual.”
And of course, Gilbert was so willing to get back to Lowe that she left Europe early and hit a plane back to New York. There, as she put it, “she fell into Rob’s arms and spent the next three weeks as a heterosexual predator.”
