Alison Arngrim Reveals the Weirdest Encounters She’s Had With ‘Little House’ Fans
What To Know
- Alison Arngrim, known for playing Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie, has experienced bizarre fan encounters.
- Some fans, especially children, have had difficulty separating Arngrim from her character.
- Arngrim credits her ability to handle unusual fan interactions to advice from costar Michael Landon.
As Walnut Grove’s pint-sized villainess, Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie, Alison Arngrim became a TV sensation. She also became the target of some truly strange fan behavior from viewers who blurred the line between actor and character. Years after hanging up Nellie’s curls, Arngrim continues to recount the odd encounters that stemmed from her iconic role.
One such interaction included a faceful of soda, as Arngrim once told People. When walking in a Christmas parade, “someone threw an orange soda at my face,” which made her realize that her character had really “hit some kind of nerve” with viewers.
“I didn’t have people going, ‘Oh, I have such a crush on you. I love you.’ It was, ‘I hate you. I hate you so much,” she told the publication.
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When she was a guest on The Jim Masters Show, Arngrim told the story of a meeting a teacher, whose students were less than thrilled about her meeting Nellie.
“My favorite is the kindergarten that came to one of the reunions ages ago,” recalled Arngrim. “And she was telling her class, first grade or kindergarten, about Little House on the Prairie. She was turning them on to Little House, and she was listing all the people she was going to meet [at the reunion], and one of them was Nellie Oleson. And they said, ‘Don’t go. It’s a trap. It’s dangerous.’ They were afraid for her safety.”
“She went back to her class and said, ‘Look, she’s nice! She was great.’ They were learning to write. And so she had them all — you know the big, jumbo lined paper when you are literally starting letters? So, [the letters] were like, ‘Thank you. Our teacher says you are nice, etc.’ And each of them wrote (as best as they could), these darling little letters, and she put them in a book and sent them to me.”
Courtesy Everett Collection
Another time, Arngrim and costar Melissa Gilbert were at a store together to buy baking supplies when Gilbert got recognized, but then when fans spotted Arngrim with her “nemesis,” people went to the former Laura Ingalls and told her, “You need to be careful! She’s in the store!”
“They warned her that Nellie Oleson was on aisle seven, so she would be safe to get out in time!,” laughed Arngrim.
But one of her most pleasant surprises was from a young fan who came dressed as her “dad.”
In an interview with CYInterview, Arngrim talked about the devoted “bonnetheads” who attend cast reunions, fans who are deeply obsessed with Little House, along with their children. “We had a family who came to the event,” she recalled. “And they were all dressed up.” What surprised her most was the youngest boy’s costume. He was around 7 or 8, and instead of wearing pioneer clothes like the others, “he was dressed as Mr. Oleson. He had on a suit, and he had an apron and a little pencil thing.”
But no matter the interaction, Arngrim learned to take it in stride, a skill she picked up from costar Michael Landon. “He taught me about fans,” she told CNN. “We’d be on the sets, and he’d be in the middle of screaming at someone, and a family would come on the set and he would drop what he was doing, turn around and say, here, sign autographs, hold the baby, kiss the wife, pose for pictures and then say ‘OK, thank you’ and then turn back and go ‘and another thing’ and go back to what he was doing.”
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