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Little House on the Prairie sisters Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson have squashed any bad blood decades after the show wrapped.
“Worlds collide. Blessings abound. Hearts heal and reunite. Magic happens,” Gilbert, 61, wrote via Instagram on Saturday, December 27. “Last night after @penpalsplay my genius costar @veannecox had a surprise in the audience. Boy, am I glad I didn’t know in advance that the remarkable @blbuckley was there. But I had a secret of my own.”
Gilbert and Veanne Cox are among the rotating cast in the off-Broadway production of Pen Pals, a play chronicling the decades-long friendship between two women living in different countries. While Cox, 62, organized a special visit from Betty Buckley for the Friday, December 26, performance, Gilbert secretly invited Anderson, 63, to attend, as well.
“I’ve been keeping [this] close to my heart for a while now. Reconnection with a sister. Long, healing talks,” Gilbert said. “Lots of reminiscing. Lots of catching up. Lots of laughter and a few tears.”
She continued, “I’m so happy to have Melissa Anderson back in my life. We share such an important history that no one else on earth truly understands. Just us Ingalls girls. The best part is, the past is now just that and we can move forward as the sisters/friends we always wanted to be. What a wonderful Christmas gift.”
Gilbert and Anderson starred as sisters Laura and Mary Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie from 1974 to 1983. Despite playing close-knit characters, the two actresses were never as friendly between takes.
“I honestly do not have a lot of memories of the two of us,” Anderson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March 2010. “We were very, very different.”
Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson in ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ Courtesy of Everett Collection
As for Gilbert, she previously claimed that Anderson was bossy on the set.
“From the moment we walked onto that set, Melissa Sue Anderson was the boss of me. She took that absolutely seriously,” Gilbert said in a throwback interview reposted via Facebook last year. “She was two years older than me, which, you know, when you’re nine and 11 is a big deal.”
Gilbert added at the time, “She was tough. I mean both off and on camera, but on camera especially. One of the first episodes … when Ma comes home with fabric and I reach out to touch it. Melissa whacked me so hard and you can see [where] I almost started to laugh and you can see the whole spectrum of emotion on my face.”
According to Gilbert, she was tasked as “the little sister” from the moment she and Anderson stepped on set.
The Little House on the Prairie was adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels of the same name, chronicling the Ingalls family’s settlement in Kansas. The series also starred Karen Grassle and Michael Landon as Ma and Pa. Netflix is currently producing a rebooted version of Little House starring Skywalker Hughes and Alice Halsey as Mary and Laura. Crosby Fitzgerald and Luke Bracey, for their parts, will play their parents.
The new iteration already has Gilbert’s stamp of approval.
“I think there’s room in the Little House universe for all different kinds of stories to be told — just like there was always room in the Little Women universe to keep retelling that story,” Gilbert told Entertainment Weekly, comparing Little House to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women franchise. “These are classic stories, and no one’s done it where they hewed to the books completely. [Our version] was Michael Landon’s interpretation, and now it’s time for someone else’s interpretation, and I think there’s plenty of room for that.”
