Timothy Busfield on Wife Melissa Gilbert’s Transformation From Hollywood Starlet to ‘Natural Woman’

Melissa Gilbert and Timothy Busfield just celebrated their ten-year wedding anniversary. They got married in 2013 in a private ceremony at San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara. Today, they live in a cabin in New York’s Catskill Mountains where they raise chickens and grow their own food in the garden. Between 2013 and now, Busfield has watched his wife morph into someone new. Someone he calls “a natural beauty” and “the amazing person she knew she was.” 

How Melissa Gilbert and Timothy Busfield met

The Emmy Award-winning actor met Gilbert at a bar shortly after his second divorce. 

“That was my drill, at eight o’clock, there was a bar right across from Universal Studios that would open at eight and nobody would ever be in there. And then at 10 o’clock it would turn into a club,” he told People in 2022. “I would have the bar to myself for the first 45 minutes and I’d watch some sports and have a slice.”

He continued: “I remember so clearly grabbing pizza and then looking in the door to make sure there wasn’t a lot going on. There was one person sitting at the bar and she had a fedora on, and I couldn’t tell who it was, but I knew it was problematic. And it’d been about eight months. I hadn’t been on a date and I was so happy and I was spooning with my pillow and really enjoying going to bed, not involved in a relationship.”

Busfield changed his tune after chatting with Gilbert all night. 

“I knew she was the one,” he said. “It felt so real.”

Timothy Busfield on watching his wife change through the years

Busfield penned the foreword for Gilbert’s 2022 memoir, Back to the Prairie. The former Little House on the Prairie actor’s book focuses on her move away from the rat race of Hollywood and into a slower, more natural way of life. 

Of moving to the Catskills, Busfield writes:

“She traded her Rodeo Drive wardrobe for overalls. Her bright red hair returned to its roots, literally. Her face moved again: Her forehead was freed from captivity, and I could tell when she questioned something. I watched her shed the years of playing the Hollywood game of vanity and self-promotion as Melissa Gilbert the star and become Melissa Gilbert the woman—the natural woman.”

Melissa Gilbert is happy to be ‘Back to the Prairie’

“This is what I’ve always wanted,” Gilbert told People of her new life. 

In addition to slowing down and getting her hands dirty, the former Laura Ingalls is glad to be removed from the emphasis that Hollywood puts on outer beauty, particularly for women. 

“I grew up in an industry that values the outside considerably more than the inside, and I was caught in that wheel of trying to stay young,” she said.

“I finally woke up and went, ‘What am I doing? I look like a carrot top, and I’m not happy,'” she continued. “My mindset was, ‘You have to stay thin. You have to be seen in the right places, wear the right shoes and drive the right car.’ That was so drilled into me by all the outside forces. But it never sat right.”

Today, she’s happier than she’s ever been, in the mountains with her husband, her chickens, her dog, and their cozy cabin. 

“I’m finally happy in my own skin,” she said. “I’m so grateful and relieved and so much happier.”