Katherine Macgregor
Actress best known as Harriet in Little House on the Prairie
KATHERINE MACGREGOR, the actress who has died aged 93, brought comic flair and boundless energy to the role of Harriet Oleson, the villain viewers loved to hate, in all nine seasons (1974-83) of The Little House on the Prairie, the NBC television series loosely based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical stories about a 19th-century Mid-western farming family, the Ingalls. In Britain the show was a popular teatime fixture.
Small-minded, snobbish, gossipy, avaricious, scheming but essentially foolish, Harriet Oleson ran Oleson’s Mercantile, the Walnut Grove general store, with Nels, her decent and henpecked husband. Early on Katherine Macgregor formed a strong rapport with Richard Bull, the actor who played Nels, and the couple’s frequent bickering – for example, over the upbringing of their three children, notably loathsome spoilt brat Nellie (Alison Arngrim) – was frequently mined for comic potential.
At one low point the Olesons’ relationship threatens to break down altogether, when Harriet catches Nels seeking solace from a bottle of alcohollaced cough medicine and, after he speaks his mind rather too frankly, she tips a basket of eggs over his head. She also clashes frequently with Caroline “Ma” Ingalls, played by Karen Grassle: on their first meeting Mrs Oleson sniffily insists on paying “four cents less the dozen” for Ma’s brown eggs.
However, Katherine Macgregor invested the Oleson character with redeeming hints of humanity beneath the bigoted exterior. “If I’m going to be the one to wear the black hat,” she recalled years later, “something has got to give a little bit, and of course it turned into humour, because I am a comedian.” She brought a strong vein of slapstick to the performance, saying: “I think the audience counts on seeing Mrs Oleson fall on her fanny and get her comeuppance.”
She was born Dorlee Deane Macgregor in Glendale, California, on January 12 1925, and brought up in Colorado. Her stepfather worked on the railways and her mother was a housewife. After graduating from Northwestern University in Illinois she moved to New York, where she worked as a dance instructor, before studying acting with Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler. She credited Stella Adler with teaching her to “go for the universal”: “When Mrs Oleson falls on her rear, that’s a universal.”
Initially she was known as Scottie Macgregor and played some small roles on television – as well as an uncredited appearance in On the Waterfront – but mainly, through the 1960s, she established herself on Broadway and in provincial theatres, notably in productions of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and A Delicate Balance.
Moving to Los Angeles at the end of the decade, by now known as Katherine, she took parts in network television favourites such as Ironside and the detective series Mannix.
When the role of Mrs Oleson came up she read all the Little House on the Prairie books, in which the character appears only briefly. Katherine Macgregor considered turning down the part, but discerned the comic potential from one scene in the original stories, as she recalled in 1981: “It said that Nellie had a birthday party and invited the Ingalls girls. Laura [Ingalls] picked up a doll and Nellie had a tantrum and snatched it out of her hand and tore the dress. When Laura told her mother, she asked, ‘What did the mother say?’ ‘Nothing.’ I based my whole character on that. What kind of mother says nothing?”
Harriet Oleson would become a favourite of viewers and one of the mainstays of the series, along with Michael Landon as Charles Ingalls, the family patriarch, and Melissa Gilbert as Laura.
Katherine Macgregor was twice married and divorced.
Katherine Macgregor, born January 12 1925, died November 13 2018