Loretta Swit, the actress and animal activist forever known for her pioneering turn as the disciplined Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the acclaimed CBS sitcom M*A*S*H, has died. She was 87.
According to a police report, Swit died just after midnight Friday of suspected natural causes at her home in New York City, her publicist, Harlan Boll, announced.
Swit won two Emmys for her portrayal of the Army nurse — she was nominated 10 times, every year the show was on the air except the first — and appeared on 240 of the series’ 251 episodes during its sensational 11-season run.
Adapting the character from Sally Kellerman‘s film portrayal of the lusty powerhouse, Swit was one of only two actors (along with Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce) to have a role in both the pilot and series finale of M*A*S*H.
That finale, which aired Feb. 28, 1983, attracted a record of nearly 106 million viewers, and a 35-second kiss between Swit and Alda during that episode has been called the most expensive in television history, based on its length and the ad revenue per minute.
As a tough, by-the-book major, Swit’s Houlihan was a rare strong woman on television. “She was [unique] at the time and in her time, which was the ’50s, when [the Korean War] was happening,” Swit said in a 2004 discussion for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews: An Oral History of Television.
“And she became even more unique, I think, because we allowed her to continue to grow — we watched her evolve. I don’t think that’s ever been done in quite that way.”
Bolstered by her M*A*S*H fame, Swit performed in a number of movies, including Freebie and the Bean (1974), Race With the Devil (1975) and BoardHeads (1998). She also was hilarious as Polly Reed, a Sue Mengers-type agent, in Blake Edwards‘ satire of Hollywood, S.O.B. (1981).
Swit starred alongside Tyne Daly on the 1981 pilot for Cagney & Lacey, but because of contractual obligations to M*A*S*H, she could not continue when the cop series was picked up by CBS a year later. After Meg Foster played Cagney in the six-episode first season, Sharon Gless took over the role.
Active in theater, Swit starred as one of the daffy Pigeon sisters during the L.A. run of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple that starred Don Rickles and Ernest Borgnine as the ill-matched roommates.
In 1967, she starred in a national tour of Any Wednesday with Gardner McKay. Eight years later, she made her Broadway debut in Same Time, Next Year opposite Ted Bessell (That Girl). She also played on Broadway in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Loretta Jane Szwed was born on Nov. 4, 1937, in Passaic, New Jersey. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and performed in repertory.
Swit moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and landed TV gigs on such series as Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Gunsmoke and Hawaii Five-O and in the women’s lib film Stand Up and Be Counted (1972). Those parts led to Swit being considered for M*A*S*H, produced by Fox.
“I had done a guest-starring role [in the premiere episode in 1971] on Glenn Ford’s CBS series, Cade’s County, which was short-lived, but it was a wonderful role,” she said. “The network people, as well as Fox, knew about me, and when the part came up, they thought of me.”
Swit always pushed for Houlihan to grow in maturity and complexity. Her character cut off her affair with the “lipless wonder” Frank Burns (Larry Linville) to marry a soldier she could be proud of (Lt. Col. Donald Penobscott, though they quickly divorced) and revealed her vulnerability to those under her command in the season-five episode “The Nurses.”
“She was the head nurse, and her ambition was to be the best damn nurse in Korea, and I tried to help her achieve that,” Swit recalled. But in “The Nurses,” Houlihan’s conflicted relationship with authority comes into focus when, in a memorable monologue, she confronts her subordinates for not including her.
“That woman was so lonely, and she was trying to do such a good job. And nobody appreciated her,” Swit recalled in a THR oral history that marked the show’s 35th anniversary.
“Gene [Reynolds, the show’s executive producer] called me the next morning after shooting it and said they’d watched the dailies, and my scene was last. When the lights went up, everyone was sniffling,” she said. “He asked the projectionist to run the scene again. The lights go out and they watched it again. The lights go up and everyone’s still crying. He says to everyone, ‘Is that the best thing you ever saw?’”
Swit was able to carry those kinds of dramatic moments with her character throughout the series. “I was allowed to continue to grow,” she said. “I didn’t bounce back to where I was before you saw this happen to her.”
Donations in her memory can be to Actors & Others for Animals or the SwitHeart Animal Alliance, which she set up to protect, rescue, train and care for animals and preserve their habitat. She recently created a fragrance and a necklace, the sales of which supported her efforts.
When asked about the continuing impact of the show that made her a household name, Swit brought up a telegram from a fan. “It said, ‘Dear M*A*S*H folk: You made me laugh. You made me cry. You made me feel. Thank you.’ I’ve never forgotten that,” she said. “That’s one hell of a legacy.”