When she was just a newborn, the actress’s biological parents, caught up in their careers, decided to place her for adoption. Their professional ambitions took priority over raising a child, and as a result, they weren’t ready to care for her.
For years, her adoptive parents concealed the truth about her origins. She was born on May 8, 1964, at the now-closed French Hospital in Los Angeles and was adopted within 24 hours by Barbara Crane and Paul Gilbert. Her younger brother Jonathan was also adopted by the couple. Barbara, a young actress whose career was cut short, and Paul, a stand-up comedian, actor, and former circus aerialist from Buenos Aires, separated when she was six. Despite this, she remembered her father fondly, describing him as “brilliant, energetic, humorous, loving, and fair.” Paul passed away in 1976, reportedly from a stroke, and her adoption story became public.
In her memoir Prairie Tale: A Memoir, she recalled being told as a child that her birth father, David Darlington, was a Rhodes Scholar and her birth mother, Kathy Wood, a prima ballerina. Later, she discovered the truth: her mother had danced professionally, and her father was a stock car racer and sign painter. The couple, already raising three children from previous marriages, realized they couldn’t support another child and made the difficult decision to give her up.
The actress was shocked to learn more about her adoption after Paul’s death. Her godmother, Mitzi, recounted the day Barbara and Paul picked her up from the hospital, admitting they hadn’t initially planned to adopt a child. Barbara had been undergoing fertility treatments, and although adoption hadn’t been part of the plan, she followed her husband’s instruction to bring the baby home.
Barbara and Paul had kept significant secrets about their family history, which the actress only fully uncovered later in life. She found out at 45 that Paul had actually died by suicide after struggling with pain and threats of self-harm while in VA care, rather than from a stroke. The revelation left her devastated, but she now honors his memory by advocating for mental health and suicide prevention.
Over time, she also came to terms with her adoptive mother’s choice to withhold certain truths. Today, the actress—Melissa Gilbert, famed for her role as Laura “Half-Pint” Ingalls Wilder on Little House on the Prairie—focuses on her family. She married Timothy Busfield in 2013 in an intimate ceremony in Santa Barbara, California, and together they enjoy life with their children and eight grandchildren. Melissa also has two children from previous marriages, Dakota Paul Brinkman and Michael Garrett Boxleitner. The family resides peacefully on a 14-acre property in New York’s Catskill Mountains, far from the early chaos of her beginnings.
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