These 'Little House' Siblings & Co-Stars Haven't Spoken For Years

Siblings Melissa and Jonathan weren’t blood relatives. They had been adopted by Paul Gilbert, an actor, and his partner, Barbara Crane. You would have thought that growing up on the same TV show would have made the brother and sister closer, especially as adults, but unfortunately, it put great strain on their relationship. Melissa opens up about her complicated bond with her brother in her memoir, Prairie Tale.

In Prairie Tale, released in 2009, Melissa gets remarkably candid about her experiences growing up as a child actor. She goes into much detail about her life, adoption, and thoughts towards her family. Not all of it is positive, but the memoir is a fascinating look behind the scenes of the beloved show. Despite Gilbert’s sweet child-star persona at the time, she suffered considerably behind the scenes. And she reveals how her relationship with her brother fits into this.

“I became a big sister when I was almost four years old,” Melissa recalled in the autobiography. “Jonathan arrived to great fanfare. And to my even greater annoyance. I had no idea how my parents got him, where they got him, or, more important[ly], why they got him.” The young girl wasn’t at all happy with this sudden change. Melissa wrote in the book, “As far as I was concerned, he was an interloper relegating me, the headliner, to opening-act status… I think one can safely wager I was jealous of Jonathan and wanted to get rid of him.”

Sibling rivalry is a long-established phenomenon that gets even more complicated when there’s a TV show in the mix. And as we know Little House on the Prairie became a big, big hit! So it’s little surprise that it impacted their relationship. With the show's success, Melissa was thrown into stardom at an extremely young age, which must have been challenging — as it would be for many people. The show made her the youngest-ever actress to be given a Hollywood Walk of Fame star.