Melissa Gilbert has carried lessons she learned from her years as Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie with her throughout her career.
For nearly a decade, Gilbert worked closely with her on-screen family, the head of which was Michael Landon. It was the lessons she learned from the actor, who portrayed the Ingalls family patriarch Charles, that still stand out to this day.
“There’s so much that I learned, particularly from Michael Landon. One of the things that he really instilled in us is that no one of us was any more special than anyone else who worked on the show, period, full stop,” she recalls to PEOPLE.
“Nobody had trailers that were giant and were competing with one another. We all had one room on a honey wagon. He did too. Little rooms, one after another after another,” Gilbert, 60, continues. “No one got anything better than anyone else.”
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From that, Gilbert — who previously served as President of the Screen Actors Guild from October of 2001 to February 2005 — also learned to appreciate each and every person who makes a production possible.
Landon “instilled in me in particular a love for the jobs of every single person on a set — from craft services to greensmen, to wranglers, to grips and electricians and script supervisors. I mean, editors, everyone. And really, if you remove one of those people from that position, you don’t get the show that you want.”
Landon wanted the cast to understand, Gilbert adds, “Everyone has value, and everyone’s job is just as important.” (The actor died in 1991 at age 54 following a pancreatic cancer diagnosis.)
“We tend to really focus on actors, and we do because we get the brunt of it. Our faces are out there. We’re the ones promoting it. But there’s absolutely no way we have any kind of job whatsoever unless we have all of those people around us working together,” Gilbert says.
“It is an absolute collaboration. And that goes with me everywhere I go.”
Gilbert is currently starring in the Off-Broadway play Still at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture’s Loreto Theater in New York City, through March 23. She also has a guest-starring role as Georgie McGill on Hallmark’s When Calls the Heart.
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