Celebrity News
Melissa Gilbert Calls for Better Protection of Child Stars After Hayden Panettiere’s Death
Melissa Gilbert has penned an essay encouraging better mental health protection and safety for child performers.
Follow the deaths of child stars Hayden Panettiere, Daveigh Chase and Michelle Trachtenberg, the Little House on the Prairie star demanded that child actors access better support as they transition into young adults.
“I did not know Hayden personally and only worked briefly with Mishy and Daveigh. It feels personal because I was them,” Gilbert wrote in the new Substack essay. She also listed other female child actors including Drew Barrymore, Jodie Foster and the Fanning sisters.
“We are all members of the same tribe; Female Former Child Performers, and when one of us dies, it runs through all of us like an electrical current,” Gilbert added “When three of us die so close together, something is very, very wrong.”
Gilbert wrote that she felt like the trend of the entertainment industry exploiting children before discarding them is “getting worse” and that she herself was “nearly worked to death a few times.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I worked while horribly sick, injured or worse. My father died when I was just eleven years old and I was back working on Little House within months. And not one single adult on that set discussed it with me or offered condolences,” she recalled. “I later found out that the fear was I would become too upset to work.”
“A few days after that I got sick with a horrible fever. I continued to film a few more days until I finished my work, flew home and was immediately hospitalized hallucinating from the fever. I was on the verge of sepsis,” Gilbert shared.
“Now everyone is a paparazzo. There is no privacy. What’s worse, is that what was once kept private is now exploited and sold. Often with the profits going to those whom the victim (yes, victim) was/is closest to and trusts. It’s not just in restaurants, clubs, and on red carpets, it’s in homes, doctor’s offices, schools, everywhere.” she said.
“All I know is something has got to be done,” Gilbert sternly said. “I have this image in my mind of Hayden’s little girl who will now grow up without her Mama. She is eleven years old. That’s the same age I was when my father died.”
When Daveigh Chased passed away, Gilbert paid tribute on Instagram. The duo worked together on an unaired pilot filmed two decades prior, on which she noticed an unhealthy pattern.
“She was bubbly, sweet and professional. But there was something else there, a push or need to perform …for her parents,” she wrote on social media in June.
“Child stardom , in itself, is not a guarantee of dysfunction. However, when a parent or parents lose sight of who THEY are, of what their true responsibility is, and their lives revolve solely around their little star child,” she concluded.
