Commemorating its 50th anniversary, Gilbert is reminiscing on the touching ways Landon “set the tone” for the classic series.
Melissa Gilbert starred on Little House on the Prairie for nine seasons, but she still got shy during photoshoots. Now she’s revealing the cute way her on-screen father, Michael Landon, helped her get comfortable.
“I don’t like doing still photography, so it can be uncomfortable for me,” Gilbert told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview to commemorate the series’ 50th anniversary. “But as a kid, it was even worse, and Michael hated it as much as I did. So he would do everything in his power to make me laugh while we were shooting pictures… I’m laughing, and it’s because he had just taken one of my pigtails and shoved it up my nose.”
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Gilbert played Laura Ingalls Wilder, the original author of the Little House on the Prairie books, from the time she was 10 to when she turned 20. Landon acted as one of the show’s directors and executive producers, and also played Gilbert’s father, Charles Ingalls, for the whole series run. The experience brought the two close together for life.
She describes Landon as the show’s “quarterback,” who “set the tone of what we were doing.” She said that her relationship with Landon was “unique in that I was the only cast member who regularly socialized with him and his family… We all vacationed together during spring break to Hawaii — the same hotel every year,” she explained. “Mike’s kids went to the same school I went to. I slept over at their house all the time. They slept over at my house.”
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Landon died of pancreatic cancer in 1991. He was 54. Charles Ingalls became one of his defining roles, but he had a career beyond the Prairie in Western films and series like God’s Little Acre, Tales of Wells Fargo, and Bonanza, on which he starred as Joseph ‘Little Joe’ Cartwright for 430 episodes.
In a 2014 remembrance, Gilbert told Entertainment Weekly that “what I remember the most from my audition was meeting Michael Landon.” She described him as having “this unbelievable glow that was captivating… He made me laugh and feel instantly comfortable and there was something between us that I had never experienced in an audition room. It was special and it was instant.”
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She also remembered other instances of Landon’s playful nature, saying she’d “catch frogs and Mike would put the frogs in his mouth and walk over to people and talk, and then the frogs would jump out. That was our big trick.”
Not every Prairie alum remembers Landon so sweetly, however. Karen Grassle, who played Landon’s on-screen wife Caroline, released a memoir in 2021 in which she detailed a disturbing account of his behind-the-scenes behavior, which allegedly included cutting down on her storylines after a salary dispute, prompting laughter from the crew at Grassle’s expense behind her back, and most disturbingly, “Mike would say ‘c—‘ and make disgusting jokes about how a woman smelled after sex,” according to a NYPost report.
Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie for seven seasons, echoed Grassle’s comments to the Daily Mail, calling him “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
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Gilbert still feels that Prairie “is just so special and so wonderfully well written,” calling her on-screen family “my surrogate family,” and the many episodes they shared “wonderfully elaborate ‘home movies.'”
A Little House on the Prairie reboot was announced in 2020 via Paramount TV Studios and Anonymous Content, but several original cast members, including Arngrim and Grassle, told PEOPLE in June that a reboot isn’t likely to happen. Grassle said, “I think we had a unique experience and it can’t be repeated.”
