Melissa Gilbert’s former co-star spoke out about the controversy over their first onscreen kiss.
The “Dancing With the Stars” season 14 alum was a little girl when she was cast as Laura Ingalls on the drama series “Little House on the Prairie.” By the time season 6 rolled around in 1979, Gilbert was just 15 years old and was embroiled in a storyline about her character’s first real romance. The arc required the “young” 15-year-old to kiss her co-star, Dean Butler who was 23 at the time.
In a June 2024 interview with Fox Digital, Butler, now 68, noted that such a move would never fly on television today, despite the fact that the story came from author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s true story. (In real life, Wilder was actually 10 years older than his teen wife).
“You just couldn’t do it today,” Butler told Fox in the interview. “There would be way too much blowback.”
Of the controversy the scene stirred up, Butler added, “There were some letters . . . and comments about this age difference. Mothers were concerned.”
Dean Butler Wished He Was Closer in Age to Melissa Gilbert
GettyMelissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls and Dean Butler as Ingalls’ fiance, Almanzo James Wilder, in an episode from the 1980 – 1981 season of the television series ‘Little House on the Prairie.”
The controversial kiss took place in the 1980 episode “Sweet Sixteen.” Butler told Fox that the scene was carefully supervised by actor/producer Michael Landon, with 100 other people on set.
“She was really a little girl,” Butler said of Gilbert. “She was very sophisticated in the ways of the industry. As an actress, she was very skilled. But as a young woman, she was very inexperienced. …. She’d never been on a date. Never kissed anyone. Never did anything like that. … She just did it. She put all of her anxieties aside and just stepped in. “
While the scene was handled as tastefully as possible, Butler admitted he was anxious about it. In April 2024, he told People, “I think that there was anxiety on both sides of that kiss and how is this going to go? But we stepped up to it.”
Butler admitted he wished he didn’t have such a big age gap with Gilbert. “I’ve often said to Melissa, ‘I wish we could have been a little closer in age when we were doing this.’ But that’s not the way it really happened,” he said in the People interview. “Laura was 10 years younger than Almanzo. But from the perspective of playing it, I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could have [had] … a little more common ground, so we would’ve been able to play the loving side of this in perhaps a little bit more interesting way.”
Melissa Gilbert Did Not Want to Kiss Dean Butler
Gilbert, now 60, previously wrote about the kiss in her memoir, “Prairie Tale.” She admitted that the thought of kissing Butler made her sick.
“This was Laura’s first real kiss, one she desired, and it made me sick,” the actress wrote in her 2009n tell-all. “I didn’t want to kiss a man. I didn’t want to kiss anyone with stubble!”
She continued, “I quipped that I would’ve preferred to kiss Scott Baio or Shaun Cassidy. I knew those teen-idol guys were unattainable and therefore safe to mention, though the truth was, I didn’t want to kiss anyone.”
The “Little House on the Prairie” star noted that she had no idea how to approach the kiss and was afraid to talk to anyone about it. She finally decided to just follow Butler’s lead.
“I shot my eyes (inside, they were blank screens) and gently puckered up, letting him find the target,” Gilbert wrote. “I felt like I took my first real breath in a week,” she added of how she felt when it was over.
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