NEED TO KNOW
Karen Grassle had an idea for a Little House on the Prairie storyline that never came to be: a nervous breakdown for her character Caroline Ingalls.
Grassle, 83, opened up about her time on the show in a TikTok from the Little House on the Prairie account. First, the actress, who played the “Ma” of the Ingalls family on the beloved series, was asked about what she kept from set.
“My hair,” she said. It wasn’t a wig, but “two pieces. She called one piece a “tremendously fantastic fall” that sat at the crown of her head and her short hair was tucked underneath it. “And the other was my bun. Those are in my laundry room at home,” she said.
Then she was asked if there was a storyline she wanted for Ma that never happened.
“I did create a storyline that I wanted us to do, which was when tremendous amounts of pressure came to bear on Caroline,” she said. “Let’s say a dust storm or the crops were all eaten by the bugs or whatever, and that she had a nervous breakdown.”
“This was not uncommon,” she continued. “The pressures on the pioneer women were so intense that sometimes they did have nervous breakdowns.”
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In the show, the Ingalls family — including Michael Landon’s Charles “Pa” Ingalls, Melissa Gilbert’s Laura Ingalls Wilder, Melissa Sue Anderson’s Mary Ingalls Kendall and Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush’s Carrie Ingalls — goes through many hardships, including when Pa can’t work because he’s injured, when Mary goes blind and when the whole town suffers an economic collapse.
“But, of course, the producers didn’t want Caroline to have a nervous breakdown,” Grassle noted. Grassle’s Caroline was very kind and considerate and very loyal to her husband, even when he got into some questionable schemes.
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In her 2021 memoir Bright Lights, Prairie Dust: Reflections on Life, Loss, and Love from Little House’s Ma, Grassle reflected on her own struggles with mental health and alcoholism and her decision to stop drinking in 1977 after a drunken fight with a friend. “I got some help, and I don’t think I could have done it without help,” she told PEOPLE. Shortly after she began recovery, her father died of alcoholism.
“I didn’t need anybody to tell me this is a killer disease,” she said.
Grassle’s Ma Ingalls remains beloved among fan. In May, the Today show named her America’s favorite TV mom. She told the show that she based her portrayal of Caroline on her own mother, who came from a similar “hard-scrabble background.”
Little House on the Prairie ran from 1973 to 1983, for nine seasons, plus three post-series TV films.
