Charlotte Stewart, who played Walnut Grove schoolteacher Eva “Miss” Beadle on Little House on the Prairie, is drawing renewed attention this week after describing, in a new podcast interview, how she quieted down series star and producer Michael Landon during her 1974 audition. Stewart’s account, shared August 11 on The Patrick LabyorSheaux podcast, has since been picked up by several entertainment outlets, reviving interest in Landon more than three decades after his death.
Stewart, 85, told podcast host Patrick Labyorteaux, who played Andy Garvey on the original series, that she arrived at Paramount Studios for the audition without fully grasping the scope of the project. According to her account, first detailed in a Parade writeup published August 13, she showed up in jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt while other actresses waiting to read were dressed for the show’s frontier setting. She said she was startled to find Landon in the room alongside roughly a dozen other men.
As Stewart tells it, she asked a producer seated at a large desk whether she could sit there instead, then walked to the far end of the room to begin her scene while the men in the room kept talking among themselves. She said she called for the room to be quiet, and in a separate part of the same interview recalled telling Landon specifically to “shut up.” She has said she could not quite believe what she had done during a job interview. She got the part.
Coverage of the anecdote has varied slightly in emphasis. Parade’s original writeup includes both the “quiet” and “shut up” versions of Stewart’s recollection within the same account. Outlets that picked up the story afterward, including TV Insider and Yardbarker, led with the “shut up” framing in their headlines. The core narrative, that Stewart addressed the room forcefully during her audition and still won the role, is consistent across every version of the story that has circulated since the podcast aired.
Stewart went on to appear in 45 episodes of Little House on the Prairie between 1974 and 1978, joining the cast beginning with the show’s second episode. The series ran on NBC for nine seasons, from 1974 to 1983, with Landon starring as Charles “Pa” Ingalls while also serving for much of the run as the show’s writer, director and executive producer.
Landon died on July 1, 1991, of pancreatic cancer, three months after publicly announcing his diagnosis. He was 54. In the decades since, media coverage of his career, spanning Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven, has remained a recurring presence in entertainment news, driven largely by surviving cast members recounting their time working alongside him. Stewart’s story follows that pattern. Other Little House alumni, including Melissa Gilbert and Alison Arngrim, have shared their own audition and set memories involving Landon in interviews over the past several years, and those stories have periodically resurfaced in entertainment coverage.
Stewart’s career extends well beyond Walnut Grove. She later became known for her collaborations with director David Lynch, appearing as Mary X in his 1977 film Eraserhead and as Betty Briggs in Twin Peaks, a role she reprised in the show’s 2017 revival. Earlier in her career, she took guest roles on shows including My Three Sons, Bonanza and Gunsmoke. In 2016, she published a memoir, Little House in the Hollywood Hills, co-written with Andy Demsky, which recounts her decades in the industry, including her time on set with Landon.
The Patrick LabyorSheaux podcast is hosted by Labyorteaux, who joined Little House on the Prairie in its later seasons as Andy Garvey. The show has periodically featured former cast members discussing their years on the series, and Stewart’s August 11 appearance covered other aspects of her career beyond the audition story.
As of this writing, neither Stewart nor representatives connected to Michael Landon’s estate have issued statements beyond what was shared on the podcast and in the subsequent press coverage.
