Melissa Gilbert Was Worried Rob Lowe Would Be Attracted to This ‘Oxford Blues’ Co-Star — ‘It’s Freaking Me Out’

Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert and The Outsiders star Rob Lowe got engaged in 1986. But they broke up about a year later (before getting married) after Gilbert found out she was pregnant.

After Gilbert learned Lowe had cheated on her with his co-star in The Hotel New Hampshire, she was always on the lookout for romantic scenes that involved her boyfriend. When Lowe got the part of Nick De Angelo in Oxford Blues, Gilbert was immediately worried about his relationship with Amanda Pays.

Why Amanda Pays ‘freaked [Melissa Gilbert] out’ when Rob Lowe got a part in ‘Oxford Blues’

Since Lowe had been unfaithful to Gilbert in the past, the Little House actor was always concerned about love scenes — “those were red flags,” she wrote in her memoir, Prairie Tale. But there was another reason Pays “freaked [Gilbert] out.” She looked just like the last girl Lowe had cheated on Gilbert with, Nastassja Kinski.

Gilbert wasn’t the only one who noticed the similarities between Pays and Kinski. Lowe did, too.

“It’s freaking me out,” Gilbert told Lowe.

“Don’t,” he replied, according to Gilbert. “There’s absolutely no reason. Believe me.”

Rob Lowe and Nastassja Kinski

The first time Gilbert caught Lowe cheating on her was when he was filming The Hotel New Hampshire. One night when she was trying to get a hold of him via his hotel phone, one of the hotel operators picked up and told Gilbert he was staying in Kinski’s room. So she flew to Montreal (where the movie was being filmed) and confronted him. They broke up briefly as a result but got back together after an emotional “fifteen hours of crying, screaming, talking, making love, carrying on, and laughing.”

Where Melissa Gilbert and Rob Lowe stood when he filmed ‘Oxford Blues’

Despite what had happened while filming The Hotel New Hampshire, Gilbert and Lowe were at a good place in their relationship when he left for London to film Oxford Blues.

“Letters from him arrived by the bundle, and I joined him there for a couple of blissfully fun weeks,” wrote Gilbert.

When the Little House actor got to London, it “was a nonstop party.”

“We drank and caroused our way through the city,” she wrote. “I may have seen the sun rise too many times for my own good, but I felt secure and loved and in a really comfortable place. It seemed like Rob and I had been through a fire and come out much better for the pain.”