The youngest one in curls has turned 65.
Susan Olsen, the actress who played Cindy Brady on The Brady Bunch, celebrated her milestone 65th birthday on August 14. Olsen played the pigtail-wearing youngest Brady kid from 1969 to 1974 on the original ABC sitcom, later reprising the role on The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, The Brady Girls Get Married, and The Bradys. At the height of the show’s fame, she hit the road with her TV siblings for a musical act and lent her voice to The Brady Kids animated series.
“I remember everything [about being cast on The Brady Bunch],” Olsen said during an appearance on The Barn. “It was the third day after my seventh birthday, we were celebrating it in Las Vegas, and we came home early so I could go on this audition because I wanted a series. I wanted to be a series regular and have a steady job, and so my agent called and said, ‘This is a good enough opportunity maybe you should come back early.’ So we did.”
Olsen recalled walking into the audition room, where show creator Sherwood Schwartz, an executive producer and a director, all sang happy birthday to her.
“And I thought, ‘Oh these are very nice people,’” Olsen shared. “And I remember we did not audition, none of us actually read a script, we never had to prove our acting chops. We just had to be interesting kids. And I found out later that that was part of the genius of the show was that Sherwood resisted the network [against stereotypes].”
“I think I can speak for everyone, we had a very positive experience,” Olsen added of her five seasons on The Brady Bunch.
Before being cast on The Brady Bunch at age seven, Olsen appeared in small roles in episodes of Ironside, Julia, Gunsmoke, and the 1969 Elvis Presley movie The Trouble With Girls. The latter role became her proudest acting moment.
“I was in an Elvis movie in a cameo,” she said in an interview with The Age, per MeTV. “I was going to have a bigger role, but at the last moment, they thought I was too young…But I got to meet the King. It beat being in The Brady Bunch.”
In her scene in the Elvis movie, Olsen auditions for a musical number while other kids impatiently wait for their turn. Among them is Family Affair star Anissa Jones, whose Buffy character inspired Olsen’s signature hairstyle on The Brady Bunch.
Olsen later told The Social Club Live that she loved Cindy Brady’s pigtails at first “because they made me look like Buffy on Family Affair and I really liked her.”
But Olsen went through great pains to get the Buffy/Brady look. She had to sleep with curlers in her hair and also underwent regular hair bleaching treatments to be as blonde as her Brady sisters Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb.
RELATED: Eve Plumb Opens Up About One of Her Saddest TV Roles
By the time The Brady Bunch ended its run, Olsen was 12 years old and ready to leave the tattling Cindy character behind.
“To some extent, I felt guilt, because I’d been praying for the show to be canceled,” she admitted on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast. “It’s bad enough to go through your awkward stage and to feel really ugly, but doing it on national TV is not something I wanted to do.”
Olsen struggled with being typecast after The Brady Bunch and stepped away from acting as an adult. She later studied graphic design, co-hosted a radio show, and today teaches acting and short filmmaking at a performing arts school.
“Fame was the one part I didn’t like,” she admitted to Fox News Digital of her childhood career on The Brady Bunch. “I loved the work. I loved my castmates. I really loved the industry. I really liked what I did. I was a kid who wanted a job. But fame to me was silly. Just really, really ridiculous. It was like fool’s gold.”
Related: ‘Family Affair’ Star Says Show Almost Moved to ABC Before ‘The Brady Bunch’ Took Over
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