Natalie B. Friendly, 75; Production Executive, Horse Racing Figure

Natalie B. Friendly, 75, former vice president of Ed Friendly Productions, the television production company founded by her husband, died of cancer Thursday at her Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., home.

Friendly persuaded her husband to buy the TV rights to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books, turning them into the successful, long-running NBC series that starred the late Michael Landon.

She and her husband also were well-known on the Southern California thoroughbred racing circuit and owned several winners whose names included “Natalie,” such as Natalie Knows, Another Natalie, Not Another Natalie and Yet Another Natalie.

A New York native, Friendly married Ed in 1952 and worked as a model and actress before moving to Los Angeles with him in the 1960s. She also was the author of two children’s science books and was a founding director of Neighbors of Watts. She joined her husband’s production company in the 1970s.

She retired in the late 1980s and pursued genealogy projects, writing a family history that won an award in 1999 from the Heart of America Genealogical Society and Library.