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Blanche Hanalis (11 December 1915 – 27 July 1992) was an American screenwriter and television writer best known for developing the Little House on the Prairie series as well as several made-for-TV movies based on Little House on the Prairie. [1]
Blanche Hanalis was born on 11 December 1915 in Ohio, USA. She was a writer, known for Matinee Theatre (1955), Little House on the Prairie (1974) and CBS Summer Playhouse (1987). She died on 27 July 1992 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- January 1, 1
- Ohio, USA
- January 1, 1
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Overview
- Life and career
- Death
- References
Blanche Hanalis (born December 11, 1915 - died July 22, 1992) was the creator of and then also a staff writer for the NBC-TV series Little House on the Prairie and all of the subsequent made for TV movies based on the original pilot movie Little House on the Prairie: The Pilot which aired on NBC-TV on March 30, 1974, which she developed for TV.
Blanche was born in Ohio, but grew up in the Chicago area. According to her daughter, she was an avid writer: “Her first published writing was in high school. She wrote so much of her high school yearbook that the school told her she had to write some of the articles under another name.”
Blanche's writing career started late in life. As she described it, “My husband was a struggling schoolteacher in New York and the day the youngest of my three children started school I pulled out the typewriter on the kitchen table and wrote a television script. I mailed it to the old Philco-Goodyear Playhouse and three days later they called me and said they wanted to produce it. I remember going to the first conference on changes when the script went into production. The producer asked: ‘Anybody want any changes?’ Everyone was silent. He said: ‘Okay, let’s go to lunch.’ It’s been like that almost ever since.” She went on to add, “I called my husband at school and told him they were paying me $2,500 for the script. There was silence on the line. Then he said: ‘Be careful crossing the street.’”
In 1973, Blanche wrote two pilots: “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, which was not picked up as a series, and “Little House on the Prairie”, which was picked up and ran for nine seasons on NBC.
The script for the “Little House on the Prairie” pilot closely followed events described in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s third novel and was described by executive producer Ed Friendly as being “…faithfully adapted for the screen by Blanche Hanalis.”
Following their departure from “Little House on the Prairie”, Friendly and Hanalis collaborated on two television movies for ABC – Young Pioneers and Young Pioneers Christmas;;, which were based on the novel Let the Hurricane Roar (later published as "Young Pioneers"
She continued her prolific career writing television movies, including “A Home of Our Own”, “The Children of An Lac“, “Little Lord Fauntleroy”, “Big Bend Country”, “Camille“, “Christmas Eve“, and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”.
Blanche died in Los Angeles at the age of 76 after a prolonged illness.
1.About: Blanche Hanalis. LittleHouseOnThePrairie.com.
2."Friendly Disassociates Himself From ‘Prairie’.” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1974.
Oct 30, 2019 · Blanche Hanalis: Lost Legend of the Golden Age of Television. Blanche Hanalis was one of the most creative and vigorous writers of the Golden Age of Television. Between, roughly, 1959 and 1974 Hanalis wrote more than 250 television plays and over two dozen movies (Marion Star, Ohio) March 27, 1974). For the time period in which she worked ...
Little House on the Prairie: Created by Blanche Hanalis. With Melissa Gilbert, Michael Landon, Karen Grassle, Rachel Lindsay Greenbush. The life and adventures of the Ingalls family in the nineteenth century American Midwest.
Blanche Hanalis (11 December 1915 – 27 July 1992) was an American screenwriter and television writer best known for developing the Little House on the Prairie series as well as several made-for-TV movies based on Little House on the Prairie.