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6 KOKOMO (Ind.) TRIBUNE Saturday. Oct. 22, 1977To give up $30,000 annually to alter career wasn’t easyHOLLYWOOD — Loyal viewers of NBC’s Little House on the Prairie know and love the school teacher. Miss Beadle. And the blonde actress who plays the part. Charlotte Stewart, knows and loves Miss Beadle, too.But it took a sacrifice on her part to do the part. The scarifice began, actually. some years earlier.Charlotte Stewart has long been one of television’s busiest commercial actresses. She says that, for ten years, she did one after another.Then I decided,” she says, ‘ that I didn’t like them, because I concluded they were ruining me as a regular actress. But I didn’t know what to do about it, because, after all, I was making somewhere around $30,000 a year doing them, and you just don’t kick $30,000 a year in the teeth.One day she had lunch with an old friend, Richard Dreyfus, the actor who hit it biggest in “Jaws. And she poured out her tale of woe to Dreyfus and asked him what she should do.He said that he had something of the same sort of problem, she says. He said that he had been working steadily on TV and decided he didn’t want to do TV any more. And he said that the way he had stopped was cold turkey — he iust said no more TV. and he stopped doing it. And he said that was what I would have.to do, with commercials.So, a little over a year ago, Charlotte Stewart turned her back on $30,000 a year, told her agent she would do no more commercials, and she hasn't done any since. Instead, she has concentrated on straight acting and it’s paid off with her running role on Little House On the Prairie.Besides Dreyfus, Charlotte Stewart is also seeing a psychiatrist, and she thinks that has helped. She is basically a retiring sort, hardly a fighter, and that’s been a problem for her for years.Right now, she says, “there is a certain part I want. And it’s a part I know I am physically right for you and I know I can do it and the people who are making the film are people I know.“Six months ago, I would have just sat around and then, later, I would have complained about my bad luck when somebody else got the part. But now I’ve changed. I called the director and asked for a chance to read for the part. I don't know if I’ll get it or not, but at least I will have done something.Charlotte Stewart is a shy, attractive blonde from Yuba City, in north-Charlotte Stewartern California. As a teenager she wasn’t into acting at all. In fact, all her old high school friends can’t believe that that’s their Charlotte down there in Hollywood.She says her high school grade average — a C average — wasn’t good enough to get her in the good California colleges, such as Stanford or U.C.L.A., and she didn’t want to go to one of the not-so-good ones. So instead she applied to the Pasadena Playhouse and was accepted. And that’s how she became an actress.She stayed there for three years and eventually graduated. Even before graduation she was already working and doing well.Charlotte was once Mrs. Tim Consi-dine. They were, she says, together for nine years, but only actually married for four. They were divorced in 1969 and, she says, we became friends again in 1971.”They are still friends. In fact, every-weekend, she and Tim and dozens of their friends gather at U.C.L.A. and play soccer.Aother curiosity in her life this season: one of her old Pasadena Playhouse classmates, Joshua Bryant, has been cast to play her husband on Little House On the Prairie.When you kick 30,000 in the teeth, anything can happen.
Newspaper Details
Kokomo Tribune
Kokomo, Indiana, US
Sat, Oct 22, 1977
Page 27
Full Page
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MI, USA 16 Sep 2017
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