Little House on the Prairie’s Charlotte Stewart Praises Michael Landon

Charlotte Stewart is remembering how close the cast of Little House on the Prairie was — and how actor Michael Landon was largely the reason for that tight-knit bond.

“I was very impressed with how Michael dealt with the children,” Stewart, 84, recently told Fox News Digital of her younger castmates. “He had quite a few children himself at the time. And even though he went through some problems — his divorce, and then he remarried [a makeup artist] who was with our show — [the cast] stayed as a family. He spent every single day with us.”

Stewart played Walnut Grove school teacher Eva Beadle on the hit series, while Landon played patriarch Charles Ingalls and also served as an executive producer, writer and director of the show.

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Elsewhere in the interview, Stewart applauded all of Landon’s contributions to Little House, saying, “I just admired him so much for what he contributed to the show. Not only directing, but he would be sitting at the side of the set and writing the next episode on a yellow legal pad. That’s how involved he was.”

“He didn’t just have a bunch of writers handing him a script,” she added. “He was writing on a daily basis. I respected him so much. And the children were so wonderful. They came on time, knew their lines and did the work.”

Steward noted that she was “very lucky” to have worked “with the best.”

Landon died on July 1, 1991, three months after publicly announcing his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. He was 54.

In 2024, Melissa Gilbert — who played his daughter Laura Ingalls Wilder in the show — spoke with PEOPLE about her experiences working on the beloved show with Landon and the special friendship they shared.

“Michael was the quarterback, right? So he set the tone of what we were doing,” Gilbert said.