Fans of “Little House on the Prairie” are in mourning. Hersha Parady, who played teacher Alice Garvey in the series, died on Wednesday August 23 from a brain tumor. She was 78 years old.
After the death last January at the age of 62 of Lance Kerwin, the Danny Peters of Little House on the Prairie, it is the turn of actress Hersha Parady to die. The one who played Alice Garvey, the school teacher of Walnut Grove, died on Wednesday August 23. She was 78 years old.
Suffering from a brain tumor, she was staying at the home of her son, Jonathan Peverall, in Norfolk, Virginia. He had also created a GoFundMe page to help pay his medical bills as his illness progressed. In a message posted on his facebook accounther friend Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson Dalton in the series, writes “Our wild, indomitable and talented Hersha has left us”.
Born on May 25, 1945 in Ohio, Hersha Parady made her screen debut in 1971 for an episode of the series Bearcats!, which featured two men going on an adventure in the American Southwest before World War I. She had also appeared in the series Mannix, The Family of the hills or the western series On the trail of the Cheyenne, always the time of an episode.
But his signature role of course is in The Little House On The Prairie. During 35 episodes, between 1976 and 1980, she will lend her features to Alice Garvey, the teacher of Walnut Grove, who arrived in the city following the departure of the Edwards family.
The tragic end of his character horrified the spectators of the time. In episode 18 of season 6, the fire, she died in a fire caused by the negligence of Albert Quinn Ingalls, who left to smoke in secret with a friend. Not only Alice Garvey perished in the fire, but also Mary Ingalls’ baby.
For the record, the famous sequence, below…
The scene in which Alice Garvey, holding the baby, tries unsuccessfully to break a school window, would later give rise to an urban legend that series creator Michael Landon pranked Hersha Parady by replacing a window made of easily breakable fake glass with a standard glass window.
The rest of her career is much more up and down, where she will turn irregularly: the series The Phoenix (1981); the bisseux Marathon Killer in 1984. Or Kenan & Kel, in 1997-1998, the time of two episodes, which constitute his last appearances on the screen.