'Little House on the Prairie' actor Alison Arngrim tells all in new one-woman show
From 1974 to 1983, millions of viewers tuned in each week to watch the iconic television show, “Little House on the Prairie.” This show gave viewers a peek into rural life in the late 19th century, following the adventures of the Ingalls family, based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic children’s books. The wildly popular program lasted nine seasons and inspired three movies.
One notable character in the show was Nellie Oleson, played by actor Alison Arngrim. Nellie was the pretentious, snotty girl who played the “frenemy” to Laura Ingalls, and portraying this character for nearly a decade inspired Arngrim to write a memoir about her adventures on set. It’s now a one-woman show to be performed in Atlanta at Out Front Theatre. It’s colorfully titled “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch,” and hits the stage at Out Front on April 17. Arngrim joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes to share some zesty tidbits from her autobiographical stage piece.
Interview highlights:
The girl America loved to hate:
“Nellie Oleson is this impossibly perfect, impossibly blonde, beautiful girl in school who absolutely hates [Laura],” Arngrim said. “So the Olesons run the store. It’s the only store in town. They have a monopoly, and Mrs. Oleson is awful and is constantly hassling poor Mrs. Ingalls, Laura’s mother, about the price of eggs. And Nellie is the girl who runs the school; she’s the girl who has the clique … Everyone knew this girl in junior high; everyone had this horrible girl who was just impossible and drove you crazy.”
“Don’t you always hear from actors, ‘Oh, I don’t want to play someone unlikeable?’ And I thought, ‘Well, you know, Anthony Hopkins didn’t get very concerned about that when he was Hannibal Lecter,’” said Arngrim. “So I threw likability out the window and said, ‘To hell with likeability,’ or as I say, ‘Any idiot can be liked. It takes talent to scare the crap out of people.’”
An IRL friendship with her “Prairie” nemesis, played by Melissa Gilbert:
“On TV, when you play mortal enemies, I think that does sort of lend itself to becoming lifelong friends. You get all your hostilities out. It’s like couples I’ve seen who played husband and wife on shows — you either adore each other or hate each other,” said Armgrin. “We bonded right away. We hit it off, and here we were playing enemies and literally rolling around in the dirt and the mud and hitting each other, and we thought this was hilarious. We would beat each other up all day and then go out for Slurpees after work and have slumber parties at each other’s house on the weekends.”
“It’s still going on. I was at a party at Melissa’s just a few years ago … and a grown woman said, ‘It’s so nice to see you two getting along.’ … Finally, Melissa says, ‘Oh my God, you mean on the show? … You’re a grown person. You work at Paramount. What are you talking about?’ And this woman had believed it was real for, I guess, 40 years, and we had to break it to her that it wasn’t real.”
A huge cult following in, of all places, France:
“I went to France to be on a talk show, and I got there and found out they are absolutely obsessed with ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ ‘Le Petit Maison Dans la Prairie,’ est très, très, très populaire en France, and they’re just gaga for the ‘Prairie,’ and they love Nellie Olesen, and I didn’t realize this … I got there, and ‘Whoa.’ I walked onto the set of the talk show, and the studio audience starts singing the theme song. There are no words to the theme song to ‘Little House.’”
“Then I met this guy, this crazy writer, Patrick Loubatière, and he said, ‘We could do your show in French.’ … He’d never been on stage. He’d written, but he’d never been in a play, and then I didn’t really speak French. So we made an interesting couple to do a theatrical piece in French. So I was like, ‘Okay, this is like ‘The Producers’ here.’ And people loved it,” Arngrim recounted. “We now have a long-running thing, ‘Confessions d’une Garce de la Prairie,’ and then he wrote a second show called ‘La malle aux trésors de Nellie Oleson,’ ‘Nellie Oleson’s Trunk of Treasures’ … So yeah, I have this whole other second life in France.”
Alison Arngrim’s one-woman comedy theater piece, “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch,” takes place at Out Front Theatre Company on April 16. More information and tickets are available at outfronttheatre.com/event/confessions-of-a-prairie-bitch.
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