The actress who put the spice in

On a TV show that celebrated salt-of-the-earth characters and heartland values, Katherine MacGregor played the person everyone loved to hate. From 1974 to 1983, she was the scheming Mrs. Harriet Oleson in Little House on the Prairie. Mrs. Oleson looked down her nose at everyone, refused to extend credit at the general store she ran with her husband, and harassed her spouse with vim, vinegar, and the occasional wallop from her purse. As one viewer put it in MacGregor’s favorite fan letter, the character lent “the touch of pepper in the sweetness of the show.”

MacGregor grew up in Fort Collins, Colo., and moved to New York after college to work mostly in theater until she was offered the role of a lifetime, said

The Washington Post. MacGregor almost passed on it. The Little House on the Prairie books mentioned Mrs. Oleson only briefly, in a passage about a birthday party. Mrs. Oleson’s daughter snatches a doll from another child. The aggrieved girl tells her mother, who asks about Mrs. Oleson’s reaction. “Nothing,” the girl replies. “I based my whole character on that,” said MacGregor. “What kind of mother says nothing?”

MacGregor injected the villainous Mrs. Oleson with comedic verve, said Deadline.com. She constantly was falling off horses or into muddy puddles. And in so doing, MacGregor created a popular character beloved by fans. “I look for humor in Mrs. Oleson,” MacGregor said. “She was originally painted as blackand-white mean. Anyone that mean has to be a fool. So I began mixing farce into it. I think the audience counts on seeing Mrs. Oleson fall on her fanny and get her comeuppance.”