You Won’t Believe Who Helped Nellie Oleson from ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Become ‘Evil’
There was a little girl who had golden curls on the side of her head. When she was good, she was very good indeed, but when she was bad, she was horrid. And her name was Nellie Oleson.
Alison Arngrim portrayed Nellie on Little House on the Prairie, bringing to life the spoiled, manipulative brat first seen in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels. Arngrim was the perfect foil for Melissa Gilbert‘s Laura, but Arngrim wouldn’t have been able to be as bad as she needed to be without Victor French.
French, who played Isiah Edwards on the series, directed over a dozen of episodes, and Arngrim said he helped her refine her character.
Everett Collection
“He was really good about how things should build,” Angrim said on an episode of the Little House: Fifty for 50 podcast. Angrim hosts the show alongside Dean Butler, who played Alamazo Wilder, and Little House superfan Pamela Bob.
When discussing “The Talking Machine,” the episode where Nellie embarrasses Laura after getting her to admit her crush on a new boy at school, Arngrim said that French would often tell her to “go all the way” with Nellie’s mannerisms to really drive home the point that she was a wicked little girl.
“His thing was, it didn’t really matter how you got there or what the hell you were thinking about,” said Arngrim. “You could be method. It didn’t matter as long as you just went somewhere with this thing.”
Arngrim also said that when Nellie devised her plot, she smiled wickedly. But French kept on telling her, “No. Worse. No, more evil. No, more terrible.”
“I had been reading these horror comics that week on the set with werewolves and zombies and things. They’re very, very gory and fabulous. I was 13,” she said. “And just as I’m kinda really getting into that good, like, almost the Grinch-type of evil, and then Victor said, ‘Think of your werewolf comic books!’ And then, you just see this fabulous, beautiful smile just overtake me.”
This was the malicious grin French was looking for. “He absolutely rah-rah’d, cheered me through it.”
Eventually, Nellie matures out of her wicked ways, to where — spoiler alert! — she and Laura become friends.
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