Show business has a way of wearing people down, especially for child actors. It seems absolutely exhausting as an outsider, with almost eternal hours on set. That's not to mention all the issues off-camera, grappling with millions of viewers perceiving them. For children, it's especially bad. For Susan Olsen, it occasionally felt like a nightmare. Not only was it mentally challenging, apparently, it was physically taxing as well.
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Recently, Olsen spoke with her costars on The Brady Bunch at The Chocolate Expo about some of the physical demands that came with her role. That golden blonde hair we knew her for was dyed to an outrageous degree. "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," Susan reveals. "They were trying out different things, but then my hair started to fall out. With that, I went back to letting my mom do my hair every Friday night."
Susan Olsen Reveals That Her Role on The Brady Bunch Caused Her Hair to Fall Out Early
That sounds absolutely horrible. To lose your hair at such an early age is the kind of thing that would make me seriously question if I loved show business that much. Still, she persevered through it for the sake of the show. Similarly, those trademark curls didn't come naturally either for Olsen. "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," Susan adds.
Additionally, Olsen recalls on a podcast how frustrated she was to be typecast as her character in everything. These issues also came up in her personal life as well. She frequently hoped every weekend that people would blow over her parts on episodes of The Brady Bunch. "We went back to regular public school. And I used to think, 'Thank goodness the show is on a Friday because at least the kids have a whole weekend to maybe forget about all the stupid things Cindy did while she was in my body on TV,'" Susan remembers.
"I knew every year I'd have a whole new crop of kids that had just arrived in the neighborhood who were going to treat me like I was a freak in a sideshow. But my friends were really good."
