Kelly Bishop knew when it was time to end a romance that was doomed from the start.

The actress, who caused a stir in “Dirty Dancing” and “Gilmore Girls,” has written her memoir, “The Third Gilmore Girl,” in which she describes in detail her decades-long career in show business and the pitfalls that came with it.

For her book, the 80-year-old reflected deeply on private memories that have shaped her life and that she has never shared before. One of them is about an affair with a married man after she got her first Broadway show, “Golden Rainbow,” in the summer of 1967.

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In the book, she described her former flame, whose name remained unmentioned, as “a highly successful PR agent.”

“I knew it was wrong,” Bishop told Fox News Digital about the eventual end of the relationship.

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“You shouldn’t do that,” she admitted. “He didn’t do it either… I started thinking about his wife, who may or may not have known about us, who may have experienced other affairs with him. I don’t know. But I knew it wasn’t fair to her.”

In the book, Bishop described the union as “exquisite” and “romantic.” Only two people knew about it, including a “discreet” close friend and her mother.

At first, it seemed simple. In the book, Bishop wrote that she had never met or even seen his wife, which made it “easy to ignore her existence.”

But Bishop said she loved him “so much” that “our affair was over.”

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“It was around the time I left Golden Rainbow that I finally realized that if she loved him anywhere near as much as I did, I had done this woman a huge, incredibly unkind disservice,” Bishop wrote.

“I had to say goodbye to him, and I did. It was painful for both of us – I think he was genuinely in love with me too, and it broke my heart to hurt him. But I don’t think anyone ever said that doing the right thing always feels good.”

Bishop told Fox News Digital that although she loved him, she did not regret breaking up with him for good, even if it meant leaving with a broken heart.

“If (his wife) cares about him as much as I do, then he’s hers,” Bishop said. “That’s not my job. And it still broke my heart.”

“I was lonely,” she said. “And that’s an unfortunate situation. You don’t see the person as often as you’d like. You don’t have the freedom to call them and all these other things. I just thought, ‘This is going absolutely nowhere except for more lonely nights and broken hearts.'”

“I just had to get out of here,” she thought. “I couldn’t do this anymore. So I got out.”

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After the relationship ended, Bishop reunited with Peter Miller, a Broadway stagehand and electrician who was a few years younger than her. She described him as “sweet, sexy, charming, working and single.” She was 26 and in danger of facing the “curse of spinsterhood” imposed on her by society.

The couple married in 1970. However, it was anything but a happy ending.

“I think I knew very quickly that he had a gambling problem,” Bishop told Fox News Digital. “(But) I didn’t understand it as an addiction… I had all kinds of deals with him. ‘If you do this, we’ll do this.’ I even got him to go to a therapist for a while. I later learned through my own psychotherapy that you can’t cure an addiction with therapy.”

“If you’re an alcoholic, go to Alcoholics Anonymous,” Bishop explained. “Unfortunately, there was no Gamblers Anonymous at the time. I certainly didn’t know about one. I remember thinking, ‘I wish there was one.'”

“I’m sure there are a lot of meetings these days, especially with all the online gambling you see on TV. But I guess I was very young and naive. I thought if I could just give him the confidence to know how much he was loved, he would get over it.”

“The only thing that happened was that I was completely broke when I left that marriage,” Bishop said. “That’s the way it is. It was difficult. It just didn’t work.”

Bishop wrote that it “took two years, including a trip to the Dominican Republic, to end a five-year marriage.”

“At that point, it honestly wasn’t that hard (to leave),” Bishop told Fox News Digital. “I was in so much debt… Maybe ‘cheated’ is too harsh a word, but (I was) kind of hopeless about the whole thing… I wasn’t crazy about this person anymore.”

“That’s not the person you want to be around because he’s not trying to get help. He’s not trying to help himself. He’s just looking for the next place he can get some money. And of course, with that kind of addiction – and I’m sure with probably every other kind of addiction – there’s a lot of lying involved. And I don’t like being lied to.”

“I don’t lie to myself,” she said. “It can be a turn-off for a person. It certainly turned me off. So it was just a feeling of relief when I finally broke up… I knew I had to pull myself out of the gutter I was in to get on with my life and make a living.”

Bishop found true love. In 1981, she married television presenter Lee Leonard. The marriage lasted until his death in 2018 at the age of 89.

“The secret was honesty and love, along with support – tremendous support on both sides,” she said. “We were each other’s fans. We had a great time. We just loved each other so much and respected each other’s work. We both knew how passionate we were about our own work.”

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“It was a person who respected me, supported me, was there for me and was really honest,” she continued. “We talked all the time, and we talked very openly. We had no secrets from each other. And I think it’s really that love, that respect and that communication – that’s the secret.”

Today, Bishop hopes her memoir will encourage readers, especially women, to be “their authentic selves.”

“It’s important to be your own best friend despite all the trials and tribulations we go through,” she said. “Not only will that make you happy with your life, but it will make you feel good about … your worth. Hold on to that. Don’t let anyone shake that.”

Source of the original article: “Dirty Dancing” star Kelly Bishop talks about her affair with a married man before she found her true love