NEED TO KNOW
- Susan Olsen played Cindy Brady the whole five-year span of the series The Brady Bunch
- The actress’ hair required a lot of maintenance to get Cindy’s perfect blonde curls
- Olsen opened up about The Brady Bunch years alongside her castmates during a panel at The Chocolate Expo at Hofstra University in New York
Susan Olsen had to do a lot of work to look like a Brady.
The actress, who portrayed Cindy Brady from 1969 to 1974, appeared on a panel at The Chocolate Expo at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, with three of her Brady Bunch costars: Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland and Barry Williams.
During the fan question portion of the event, someone asked if the actress, who was just shy of 8 years old when she started to play the youngest Brady sibling, had to dye her hair for the role.
“You bet,” she replied. “Every three weeks they had to dye my hair. If you look at the third season, my hair is kind of a different shade of blonde every episode.”
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“They were trying out different things, but then my hair had started to fall out. With that, I went back to letting my mom do my hair, every Friday night,” she continued.
The curls didn’t come naturally to Olsen, either. “I had to keep it rollers because my hair was straight. It couldn’t hold a curl unless I slept in them. But my mother was responsible for those ringlets.”
“In 1970, trying different things meant a whole cocktail of weird chemicals, right?” Lookinland, 64, chimed in, to which Olsen, 63, agreed.
“All I had was Miss Clairol, Jet Black number 23,” he continued. “I remember the little bottle and it said ‘jet black.’ ”
“I was ‘classic blonde,’ ” Olsen replied.
Elsewhere in the panel, the costars reflected back on their on-set bond and how they often felt like a real family.
Olsen believes that the popularity of the show was based, in part, by the fact that people could sense “the love was genuine” between the members of the cast.
“I know for me, and I might be speaking for the others, but they can chime in, that Bob and Florence were in a position for us to want to do this,” Knight shared, referring to onscreen parents Robert Reed and Florence Henderson.
“We didn’t want to disappoint them. And that’s at the center of a good parent relationship: a child that doesn’t want to disappoint their parents because of respect. And it was reciprocated, but that is because of the respect we had for them.”
The Brady kids have made other public appearances in recent months. In November, Knight and Williams were joined by Eve Plumb, who played their onscreen sister Jan, on NBC’s Today show to promote a Brady Bunch-themed sweepstakes for the charity No Kid Hungry.
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