Melora Hardin still has fond memories from her time working on Little House on the Prairie.
“I remember quite a few things because I auditioned with Matthew Labyorteaux when we were 9 to play Young Caroline and young Michael Landon’s character, Charles,” Hardin, 57, said on the Monday, January 13, episode of the “Still Here Hollywood” podcast. “Charles and Caroline had to be dancing together — and Matthew had already been cast. He said that he wanted me to play the part because I didn’t step on his feet and all the other girls did.”
Hardin, who grew up dancing ballet, wasn’t cast for the role of Young Caroline but was called back for another part.
“When the new Nelly was introduced, it was when I was 13 and my character was Belinda,” the actress recalled. “She got locked in the ice house by the new Nelly, who was just as mean as the old Nelly and then I got cast when Matthew’s character was leaving the show because he died of leukemia. I played his love interest.”
Hardin and Labyorteaux, 58, even shared their “first screen kiss together” and have remained friends.
“He’s still a very good friend of mine and the godfather of my second daughter,” the Office alum said on Monday’s episode. “He’s still in my life. And, you know, [my husband Gildart Jackson and I] didn’t let our kids watch much TV at all. We really hand-selected what they could watch and our youngest daughter, Piper, just got obsessed with Little House on the Prairie — and watched all of them over and over again. And so, it was a great, really fun experience.”
Looking back at Little House through her daughter’s point of view also reminded Hardin of her time on the set.
“I think, maybe, [it was] my first time working with someone like Michael Landon, who really had that community feeling,” Hardin said. “I also got a real feeling from Clint Eastwood when I did Absolute Power. He’s similar; he has that crew that follows him from movie to movie and he also works very much in the same way that Michael Landon works with TV pace, fast.”
Landon, who died in 1991, played patriarch Charles Ingalls on Little House. (The series was famously based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books of the same name.)
“He was just so warm [and] he was so sweet,” Hardin recalled of Landon. “He just really made all the kids and adults, I think, … feel like he had really chosen you. He just let you do your thing and even when he gave you direction, you never felt admonished by him. He was just lovely [and] he knew how to talk to kids.”
Little House ran for nine seasons starting in 1974 and also starred Melissa Gilbert, Karen Grassle and Melissa Sue Anderson as the rest of the pioneer Ingalls family.
