In the 1970s, Alison Arngrim played Nellie Olson, the ultimate mean girl on Little House on the Prairie. Decades later, she had the opportunity to reunite with one of her character's “victims,” and explain how one of her most famous bullying scenes hit a little too close to home.
During a recent episode of The Alison Arngrim Show, Arngrim, now 64, welcomed guest Katy Kurtzman, who was a guest star on Little House. Kurtzman famously played Anna Gillberg, a little girl with a stutter whom Nellie tormented, in the 1977 episode “The Music Box.”
While introducing Kurtzman, Arngrim said, “Yes, the little girl with the stutter that I was so horrible to. ...And I guess she forgave me because she came on the show and doesn't still hate me.”
Arngrim recalled, "The big [episode] that people do remember, of course, is our fabulous episode of 'The Music Box,' where you had a speech impediment, and I was awful, awful, awful, awful to you.”
Arngrim revealed that the scenes in which she had to be cruel to Kurtzman were hard for her to film, because she suffered from a real-life speech impediment herself.
“As I have told people since, I couldn't say the letter 'S' when I was in kindergarten, in the first grade. I had to go to speech class after school, and I hung out with stutterers and stammerers,” she shared. “So doing that nearly freaking killed me.”
Arngrim noted that Kurtzman’s excellent acting skills, including a heartbreaking crying scene, didn’t make it any easier.
“It made it all the more terrifying and me look even worse because you were just like sobbing and devastated,” Arngrim told Kurtzman on the podcast. “So thank you. Thank you for making me look even more evil in that scene than I already was.”
“You did evil very well,” Kurtzman replied. “You did unadjusted, maladjusted… but you always did it with sort of a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing to it.… There was something always a little quirky, a little smirky, a little snarky. You definitely had fun with it and so that was that was nice.”
Arngrim also thanked Kurtzman for forgiving her for making her character cry.
“You made my job very easy,” Kurtzman admitted. “All I had to do was be intimidated and scared of Big Nellie, and it took right out of me. I didn't have to work at all.”
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In the Little House on the Prairie Season 3 “Music Box” episode, Arngrim’s Nellie famously makes fun of Anna’s stutter and humiliates her by making her repeat a tongue twister as a way to gain acceptance into her exclusive club. As Anna struggles, Nellie commands her to say the words louder and faster.
On an episode of the Little House at 50 Podcast, Arngrim recalled “dragging” Kurtzman’s character in front of all of the other girls in the club.
“And this is the scene that’s just like stomach-churning. It’s horrible,” she said. "And Katy Kurtzman, because Katy Kurtzman is brilliant… the tears, it’s just [waterworks] pouring down her face, and she is shaking … and having like a physical body reaction.”
In 2025, Arngrim told Paradeshe was “uncomfortable” with the cruel scene and that it “creeped” her a bit.
“I call it the episode where I hate me,” the Little House on the Prairie alum admitted. “It’s like that bad, but it works, and it’s brilliant.”
Related: 1976 ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Episode, Aired During America's Bicentennial, Ranked Among ‘Best Fourth of July TV Episodes of All Time’
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