Celebrity Biographies
Katherine McGregor
The most veteran will remember the gossipy and intriguing Mrs. Oleson, from “Little House on the Prairie”, always getting into trouble with her machinations the adorable leading family, the Ingalls, mother of the hateful and repulsive Nellie, always eager to humiliate the lovely Laura, and the petty delinquent Willie (paradoxically, the husband, Nels, was good friends with Charles Ingalls).
It is worth noting the merit that the actress Katherine MacGregor had to play the matriarch , who despite the fact that she had been lucky to be the main villain of the saga, managed to arouse the sympathy of the audience, due to the humor that she printed on her character. The actress died on November 12, 2018 at the age of 93, in a residential complex of the Film and Television Pensioner Fund, in Los Angeles.
Born on January 12, 1925, in Glendale, California, Dorlee Deane McGregor (her real name) was going to be a dancer. Despite some success on the New York scene, it hadn’t quite caught on, so she thought she could make her fortune in the movies, making her big debut, at the hands of Elia Kazan in The Law of Silence , in a small role as the mother of a stevedore.
But luck was not on her side, and since she barely got middling contracts on the big screen, Katherine MacGregor took refuge on television, where she appeared in a dozen series of the time, including Ironside .
In 1974 NBC recruited her for a fixed character in the aforementioned Little House on the Prairie , a friendly version for the small screen of Laura Ingalls’ hard childhood memory book. Despite the fact that the product was endorsed by the presence of a star, Michael Landon, very famous for Bonanza , the company did not even imagine the enormous repercussion that the series was going to have throughout the world. The actress remained in the cast until its completion in 1983, but curiously she could not be in the last and sad chapter, because by then she had converted to Hinduism and she was on a pilgrimage in India.
Totally typecast, she did not return to the screen, except in 2014 for a role in the short The Lottery . She took refuge in the theater stages, and worked as an interpretation teacher for children. Divorced in 1950 from fellow actor Bert Remsen ( Dallas ), she joined Edward G. Kaye-Martin for a few years, outside the world of acting. She had no children.
Those who were viewers in the 70s will remember that at the peak of her popularity Katherine MacGregor traveled to Spain to offer an interview broadcast on the popular program about the programs that were going to be broadcast on TVE “625 lines”. Since then only the public channel existed, La casa de la prairie marked an entire era of Spanish television.