Did Melissa Gilbert Date Billy Idol? All About the ‘Little House’ Star’s Past Loves
Melissa Gilbert may be best known as the spunky but wholesome Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie. But offscreen, Gilbert — now 60 and happily married to thirtysomething and Revenge of the Nerds actor Timothy Busfield — enjoyed an active and steamy love life that fascinated her fans for decades. So who did the thrice-married Melissa Gilbert date? Here are the highlights!
Gilbert Dated Dreamboats
Tom Cruise
Warner Brothers/Everett Collection
Gilbert was infinitely more famous than the Top Gun star when they crossed paths while Gilbert was in her mid-teens. “When I dated him, he was Tom Mapother still,” Gilbert told Andy Cohen on an episode of Watch What Happens Live. “It was when he first moved to Los Angeles and I think I was 16, maybe, or 17?
“We made out, but, honestly, there was no sex,” Gilbert continued. He was a good kisser. But he was a struggling, starving actor. I actually bought him his first set of dishes.”
Rob Lowe
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Gilbert told Access Hollywood that she was only 14 or 15 when Lowe came rushing up to her on the lot where she was appearing on a talk show. To make sure the famous teen knew that Lowe, too, was a working actor, he tucked a script under his arm before he came over to say hello.
Years later, the pair spotted each other again at a stoplight and exchanged numbers. “I fell instantly, hopelessly and stupidly in love,” Gilbert wrote in her 2010 memoir, Prairie Tale. “We went from first date to instant couple. I felt like I was starving for Rob.”
The pair launched a tumultuous, six-year romance, complete with multiple breakups, an engagement and a lost pregnancy. Faced with long separations as Lowe filmed multiple movies, both partners indulged in affairs. Lowe hooked up with his The Hotel New Hampshire costar Nastassja Kinski, his St. Elmo’s Fire costar Demi Moore and Princess Stephanie of Monaco. Gilbert responded by having a fling with Lowe’s best friend, John Cusack. “It was my own private ‘screw you’” Gilbert wrote.
Frank Capra III
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In her memoir, Gilbert also admitted that she started seeing It’s a Wonderful Life director Frank Capra’s grandson during her and Lowe’s relationship.
At the time, Rob was filming the romantic comedy The Hotel New Hampshire in Canada, where Gilbert caught him red-handed in his affair with Kinski. Gilbert would soon head to Texas to film the family film Sylvester, on which her own onscreen love interest was Pretty in Pink hunk Michael Schoeffling. But rather than fall for Schoeffling, Gilbert wrote, “I began an on-set romance with the third AD, Frank Capra III.”
Billy Idol
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Gilbert met pop-punk rocker Billy Idol post-Lowe when both were seated in the celebrity section of an LA club. Gilbert thought the spiky haired singer was “gorgeous.” And when the pair got to talking, Gilbert discovered Idol was more interested in her life on the prairie than regaling her with rockstar stories.
“He impressed me as a sweet, gentle and soft-spoken charmer,” Gilbert wrote in Prairie Tale. “He wanted to know all about Michael Landon, and he asked what it was like to grow up on television.” Gilbert said the pair had fun together, and enjoyed watching the paparazzi trying to make sense of Laura Ingalls loved up by the Rebel Yell-er. But the fling fizzled quickly thanks to Idol’s hard-partying lifestyle.
Gilbert’s Marriage Era
Bo Brinkman
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After her run of high-profile relationships throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, Gilbert felt ready to settle down. She met Texas-born writer/director/actor Bo Brinkman at a dinner and was instantly smitten. “I turned around and saw this long-haired, very handsome man,” she wrote of Brinkman, who claims Randy and Dennis Quaid and Sharon Tate as his cousins. “He was gorgeous and had danger written all over him.”
The pair married in 1988, when Gilbert was 24, and had a son they named Dakota. Shortly after the boy’s birth, things began to sour with the pair. During one separation, Brinkman even slept with Gilbert’s former Little House costar Shannen Doherty — which Doherty claimed was only because she idolized Gilbert so much.
When Brinkman was cast in the 1993 war epic Gettysburg, Gilbert got word that the National Enquirer was about to run a story about Brinkman’s continued infidelity. She got the story killed, but flew to the Gettysburg set to tell her first husband their marriage was over.
Bruce Boxleitner
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Not one to stay single for long, Gilbert moved on to marry Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Babylon 5 actor Bruce Boxleitner, on whom she’d once nursed a teenage crush. The pair also had a son, whom they named Michael after Gilbert’s beloved Little House pa, Michael Landon.
Though Gilbert and Boxleitner were married for 16 years, she discovered that they held wildly different beliefs about family and commitment. After Boxleitner left Gilbert largely alone to heal from a broken back, she knew the marriage was over.
Though Gilbert admits she “lost her mind” after the divorce — telling Page Six that she indulged in cosmetic procedures, bought a convertible and romanced a young Frenchman she met on vacation — she met her true match, Busfield, a year later and married him in 2013.
And One Near Miss
Scott Baio
United Artists/courtesy Everett Collection
Gilbert is often rumored to have dated Happy Days star Scott Baio when the sitcom filmed on the Paramount lot where Little House shot its interiors. At the time, Gilbert nursed a raging crush on Baio and tore out Tiger Beat photos of him to put up in her locker. And whenever she and her pal, Square Pegs actress Tracy Nelson, had a chance, they’d stalk craft services and sit in on Happy Days tapings to see the object of their shared affection. The friends even retooled the Linda Ronstadt hit “Blue Bayou” to “Scott Baaaaaioooouuuuu!”
However, Gilbert wrote in Prairie Tales, her love for Baio was entirely unrequited.
Remind 
TV Weddings
February 2023
This issue brings you the jitters and joys of the most beloved betrothals in TV and movie history.
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