Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert competed on Dancing With The Stars in March 2012 as part of the Season 14 cast. Her partner was Maksim Chmerkovskiy, whom she still ‘gets along with “adores” to this day. But she has complicated feelings about the show itself. The Laura Ingalls actor was on DWTS during a time when she was on the cusp of learning who the real Melissa Gilbert is. And, as it turns out, DWTS doesn’t agree with the real Melissa Gilbert.
Melissa Gilbert felt like she had to do ‘Dancing With The Stars’ to prove that her back had healed
Gilbert broke her back when she was playing Laura Ingalls’ mother in the touring musical of Little House on the Prairie back in 2009. But she didn’t learn she’d broken her back until after the musical had wrapped. So she trudged through the tour by receiving steroids and epidural nerve blocks. Once a doctor told her that she’d been walking around (and singing and dancing) with a broken back, she underwent surgery. The healing process was long a grueling (and it’s actually when the actor started questioning her second marriage to Bruce Boxleitner).
Three years and one divorce later, Gilbert was asked to be on Dancing With the Stars. At the time, she felt like she had something to prove.
“I got invited to be part of the ultimate spray-tan-glitter-fake-hair-fake-everything festival of falsity, except for the fact I was training nonstop and telling myself that I had to do this farkakte show to prove that my back was healed and I could do anything I wanted,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir Back to the Prairie.
The ‘Little House’ alum calls her ‘DWTS’ experience ‘agonizing’
No one on DWTS ever calls their time on the show easy. Gilbert says her experience was “hands-down the most agonizing, painful, physical, emotional, exhausting thing I had done in my life at that point.”
What’s more, she felt the whole philosophy of the show “skewed [her] life the wrong way.” It’s not something she would do today.
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Despite the toll the show took on Gilbert’s mind and body, she really did enjoy being paired with her partner, Maksim Chmerkovskiy, whom she calls “a demanding, generous, warm, temperamental, funny, difficult, charming, talented, and emotional perfectionist.”
She says she still adores him to this day.
Melissa Gilbert’s ‘DWTS’ concussion
If you watched Season 14 of DWTS, surely you remember the drama of Gilbert’s concussion. It took place during week four when the couple was dancing the Paso Doble. She hit her head on her partner’s leg and was taken to the hospital that night.
“Our paso doble was one of the hardest things I had ever tried to learn,” she wrote. “It proved that I really could tackle anything that I put my mind to, and my body would follow, sometimes reluctantly, but damn it, it did as requested. On the live broadcast, our paso started with a surprisingly impressive combination of speed, precision, and Spanish flair. But as Maks and I approached the climactic drop spin, I got too close to him and catastrophe struck. His feet caught my head and neck, and suddenly the six-foot-two-inch Ukrainian went flying while I screamed in pain.”
Gilbert’s instinct was to walk it off and act like she wasn’t in pain. But she knew it wasn’t good. An ambulance took her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with a severe concussion and whiplash and sent home to rest.
Not too long after Gilbert’s time on the show, she realized she needed to make a big change. She was tired of the glitz, glam, and hyper-competitiveness of Hollywood. She wanted to take her life in a new direction.
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