Valerie Bertinelli has spent much of her life in front of cameras.

She became famous as a teenager on One Day at a Time. She married one of the most recognizable rock guitarists in the world. Her relationship with Eddie Van Halen was photographed, discussed and followed for decades.

So it would be easy to assume Bertinelli had already seen nearly every surviving photograph from that chapter of her life.

She hadn’t.

More than 40 years after she and Van Halen first fell in love, Bertinelli has begun discovering photographs she did not even remember existed.

They were not taken by a professional entertainment photographer.

They came from someone much closer.

Her brother David.

And because David often carried a camera while spending time with his sister, his collection captured something celebrity photographs often missed: ordinary moments from the earliest days of Valerie and Eddie’s relationship.

Now those forgotten images are finally coming back out of storage.

Her Brother Had Been Taking Pictures All Along

Bertinelli recently launched a new series called Undeveloped: Stories from the Vault through her digital platform, Valerie’s Place.

The concept is unusually simple.

She sits down with her brother David and goes through photographs he took decades ago.

But part of what makes the series emotional is that Bertinelli often does not know what she is about to see.

“These are throwback pictures that I’ve never posted because I’ve never seen them,” Bertinelli told PEOPLE.

She said viewers are essentially watching her genuine reaction as David surprises her with images from their past.

Some photographs had apparently disappeared from both siblings’ memories.

Bertinelli said David had always been a talented photographer and would sometimes travel with her, quietly documenting what was happening around them.

Years later, those rolls of film became a kind of accidental family archive.

And buried inside were photographs from one particularly important period.

The beginning of Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen’s relationship.

Valerie Had Completely Forgotten About Some of Them

Bertinelli said she had “totally forgot” about many of the photographs David captured when she and Eddie first became a couple.

David had forgotten about some of them too.

That is what makes the discovery different from simply pulling an old celebrity album off a shelf.

These were not famous red-carpet pictures Bertinelli had seen hundreds of times.

In some cases, even she was encountering them almost as if they belonged to somebody else’s life.

David had been there during those early years, carrying his camera while accompanying his sister on the road.

Decades later, he began going back through the collection.

The photographs suddenly brought back details that neither sibling had been actively thinking about for years.

For Bertinelli, the experience is especially powerful because those early years now represent a period that can never be recreated.

Eddie Van Halen died in October 2020 at age 65 after battling cancer.

That gives every newly discovered photograph additional weight.

It is no longer simply an old picture of a young couple.

It is a moment she did not know she still had.

Valerie and Eddie’s Story Began in 1980

The photographs reach back toward one of the most famous chapters of Bertinelli’s life.

She met Van Halen in 1980 when she attended one of his band’s concerts in Shreveport, Louisiana.

At the time, Bertinelli was already a television star thanks to One Day at a Time.

Eddie Van Halen was becoming a rock phenomenon.

The two met backstage and quickly began a relationship.

They married in April 1981, less than a year after meeting. Later, they welcomed their son Wolfgang in 1991. Their marriage eventually ended after they separated in 2001, with their divorce finalized in 2007.

Their story was complicated.

Bertinelli has spoken candidly in later years about addiction, infidelity and the difficulties that existed inside the marriage.

She has also acknowledged that after Eddie’s death, she sometimes romanticized parts of their history.

What remained unquestionable was their bond through Wolfgang and the fact that Bertinelli and Van Halen stayed connected long after their marriage ended.

That complexity makes David’s photographs even more fascinating.

They come from before decades of hindsight.

Before separation.

Before divorce.

Before anyone knew what the relationship would eventually become.

They preserve two young people near the beginning.

These Aren’t the Familiar Eddie and Valerie Pictures

Fans have seen plenty of photographs of Bertinelli and Van Halen over the years.

There are images from concerts.

Professional portraits.

Award shows.

Family photographs.

After Eddie’s death in 2020, Bertinelli herself shared personal images from the night they first met, as well as photographs from Christmas 1980 and later moments with Wolfgang.

David’s archive offers something slightly different.

His perspective was not that of a journalist documenting a celebrity couple.

He was Valerie’s brother.

He was simply nearby.

That can change a photograph completely.

People behave differently when the person holding the camera is family. Expressions become less guarded. Moments may feel more casual. Nobody necessarily thinks the picture will someday be published for millions of strangers.

At the time, David could not have known that the young guitarist appearing around his sister would become one of the most influential rock musicians of his generation.

Nor could he have known that the photographs sitting undeveloped or forgotten for decades would eventually become part of the family’s historical record.

He was simply taking pictures.

The Series Is Also About David

Interestingly, Bertinelli says the project is not only about herself.

One of her motivations is to finally give her brother recognition for the work he was doing behind the camera.

David now works as an animal control officer in Michigan, and Bertinelli describes him as naturally shy.

She calls him the “ultimate middle child” and jokes that people sometimes forgot about him growing up.

But there is clearly affection beneath the joke.

Bertinelli said it hurts her heart because she considers David a special person who has never tried to draw attention to himself.

With Undeveloped, she wants people to see his talent.

“He’s never been one to really make a big deal about himself,” Bertinelli said. “And I just want to kind of highlight his talents.”

The siblings also use the photographs to compare their memories.

Two children can grow up in the same home and remember the same event completely differently.

Bertinelli says those conversations — David’s version of something compared with her own — have become part of the fun.

A Photograph Can Bring Back More Than a Face

Bertinelli launched Valerie’s Place in February 2026 as a subscription platform where she could create material on her own terms, including cooking shows, a podcast and a book club.

Undeveloped fits naturally into that idea.

It is less polished than a celebrity retrospective and more like opening a box in the attic with a family member sitting beside you.

Sometimes Bertinelli knows what she is looking at.

Sometimes she does not.

And occasionally, David produces an image that seems to return an entire era to her.

That is why the photographs involving Eddie Van Halen carry such an obvious emotional charge.

Their relationship eventually became public, complicated and enormously well documented.

But David’s camera was there before much of that history had happened.

He photographed his sister while she was simply living it.

Valerie Bertinelli thought she knew the photographs that remained from those years.

Then her brother opened his archive.

And suddenly, pieces of her earliest days with Eddie were waiting there — preserved on film, forgotten by almost everyone, including Valerie herself.