Before Michael Landon’s Daughter Jennifer Was Teeter on ‘Yellowstone,’ She Was a Soap Star
Michael Landon, star and director of the beloved series Little House on the Prairie, had his own clan of nine children. Several of his kids have followed in his footsteps, including one of his youngest, Jennifer Landon. Born to Landon and his third wife Cindy Clerico, she was too young to appear on Little House like some of his other children, but she still forged her own path in Hollywood as she grew up. She made a cameo in Landon’s show Highway to Heaven, but her first credited role was in the 1991 television film Us, one of her father’s final projects before his untimely death.
It was there that she caught the acting bug and went on to appear in the soap opera As the World Turns, for which she won three consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series. In 2006, Jennifer proved that she could sing too when her character began pursuing a music career, and she performed several songs herself on the show. She also appeared in soaps Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless.
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For those non-soap fans out there, Jennifer got her big break when she was cast as Teeter in the popular show Yellowstone. Teeter has a very specific accent, and Jennifer revealed that showrunner Taylor Sheridan wrote out her lines phonetically so she would understand how to speak. She explained, “I was tickled by the fact that she always made sense to me. I always knew exactly what she was saying, and that was not the case for a lot of people who would read it.”
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Now, the 41-year-old (her birthday is Aug. 29!) most recently appeared in the show FBI: Most Wanted and is set to appear in a film called Brothers this year. Jennifer makes sure to keep her father’s legacy alive by being a PanCAN ambassador, helping to spread awareness about pancreatic cancer, the disease that killed her father. She also likes to share her earliest memories of him, although he passed away when she was just 7 years old.
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She said, “He was always so present as a father. He’d watch me jump around the pool for an hour straight. I think he genuinely enjoyed it. I felt admired by him — which is an amazing feeling to have as a child. He was just the best! That doesn’t mean we had free rein. There was a tremendous amount of respect and discipline that was implanted in our house — but my dad always made things so fun, too. He had this ability to make you feel like something magical could happen or that you were on the edge of discovery.”
Remind 