Little House Sisters Mend Fences After Decades of Distance

Little House on the Prairie siblings Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson have put aside any past disagreements decades after the show concluded.

“Worlds are merging. Blessings are plentiful. Hearts are mending and reconnecting. Magic is unfolding,” Gilbert, 61, shared via Instagram on Saturday, December 27. “Last night following @penpalsplay my brilliant costar @veannecox arranged a special surprise in the audience. I’m certainly glad I didn’t know beforehand that the remarkable @blbuckley was present. But I had a secret of my own.”

Gilbert and Veanne Cox are among the rotating performers in the off-Broadway production of Pen Pals, a play exploring the long-standing friendship between two women residing in different nations. While Cox, 62, organized a special appearance from Betty Buckley for the Friday, December 26, performance, Gilbert secretly invited Anderson, 63, to attend as well.

“I’ve been holding [this] dear to my heart for some time now. A reunion with a sister. Extended, restorative conversations,” Gilbert stated. “Much reminiscing. Much catching up. Much laughter and a few tears.”

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She continued, “I’m so delighted to have Melissa Anderson back in my life. We share a significant history that no one else on earth truly understands. Just us Ingalls girls. The wonderful thing is, the past is now just that and we can progress as the sisters/friends we always desired to be. What a lovely Christmas gift.”

Gilbert and Anderson portrayed sisters Laura and Mary Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie from 1974 to 1983. Despite playing affectionate characters, the two actresses were never as close off-screen.

“I honestly don’t have many recollections of the two of us together,” Anderson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March 2010. “We were quite different.”

As for Gilbert, she previously mentioned that Anderson was assertive on the set.

“From the moment we stepped onto that set, Melissa Sue Anderson was in charge of me. She took that very 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 demanding. I mean both off and on camera, but especially on camera. In one of the early episodes … when Ma brings home fabric and I reach out to touch it. Melissa struck me so hard and you can see [where] I almost started to chuckle and you can see the whole range of emotion on my face.”

According to Gilbert, she was designated as “the younger sister” from the moment she and Anderson began working on the show.

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The Little House on the Prairie was adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels of the same name, depicting the Ingalls family’s settlement in Kansas. The series also featured Karen Grassle and Michael Landon as Ma and Pa. Netflix is presently producing a reimagined version of Little House starring Skywalker Hughes and Alice Halsey as Mary and Laura. Crosby Fitzgerald and Luke Bracey, for their parts, will portray their parents.

The new version has already received Gilbert’s approval.

“I believe there’s room in the Little House universe for various kinds of stories to be told – just as there was always room in the Little Women universe to continue retelling that story,” Gilbert told Entertainment Weekly, drawing a comparison between Little House and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series. “These are classic narratives, and no one has ever presented them where they adhered 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 space for that.”