Little House on the Prairie’s Alison Arngrim Says It Was ‘Hard’ Being ‘Very Famous’ as a Child Actor (Exclusive)

But being a child actor on a popular show like Little House also presented unique challenges many of her non-celebrity contemporaries would never have to deal with.

“When you look at what an adult goes through — going into show business, sudden loss of privacy, becoming very famous, stalkers, craziness — think about that happening when you’re nine,” she explains. “You’re still learning. Imagine you haven’t gotten to long division yet. You’re learning basic math and learning to read, and you now need to deal with what the National Enquirer thinks about you.”

When Arngrim departed Little House at 19 after seven seasons, she found it wasn’t so easy to leave her role behind. The “bad girl” character had become so lodged in the cultural zeitgeist that many weren’t able to separate fiction from reality.

“People hated me. They hated me, hated me,” the actress says, adding, “When the show ended, as a young actress, I like most normal actors was like, well, now the show’s done. We’ll go on with our lives and everyone will talk about something else. That didn’t happen. Because then the show did have cable … and then there were DVDs, and then there was nostalgia, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger.”

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Someone once threw a cup of orange soda in Arngirm’s face while at a Christmas parade, which she took with good humor.  (“I was a moving target, and they hit me, so I’m kind of impressed,” she says.) Another time, a woman confronted the actress at a Little House fan event and simply said, “I forgive you,” before walking out.