Loretta Swit, who won two Emmy Awards playing Major Margaret Houlihan, the demanding head nurse of a behind-the-lines surgical unit during the Korean War on the pioneering hit TV series “M.A.S.H.,” has died. She was 87.
Publicist Harlan Boll says Swit died Friday at her home in New York City, likely from natural causes.
Swit and Alan Alda were the longest-serving cast members on “M.A.S.H.,” which was based on Robert Altman’s 1970 film, which was itself based on a novel by Richard Hooker, the pseudonym of H. Richard Hornberger.
The CBS show aired for 11 years from 1972 to 1983, revolving around life at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, which gave the show its name. The 2 1/2-hour finale on Feb. 28, 1983, lured over 100 million viewers, the most-watched episode of any scripted series ever.
…….In Altman’s 1970 film, Houlihan was a one-dimensional character — a sex-crazed bimbo who earned the nickname “Hot Lips.” Her intimate moments were broadcast to the entire camp after somebody planted a microphone under her bed.
Sally Kellerman played Houlihan in the movie version and Swit took it over for TV, eventually deepening and creating her into a much fuller character. The sexual appetite was played down, and she wasn’t even called “Hot Lips” in the later years.
The growing awareness of feminism in the ’70s spurred Houlihan’s transformation from caricature to real person, but a lot of the change was due to Swit’s influence on the scriptwriters.
“Around the second or third year I decided to try to play her as a real person, in an intelligent fashion, even if it meant hurting the jokes,” Swit told Suzy Kalter, author of “The Complete Book of “M.A.S.H.’
“To oversimplify it, I took each traumatic change that happened in her life and kept it. I didn’t go into the next episode as if it were a different character in a different play. She was a character in constant flux; she never stopped developing.”
……..Swit appeared in all but 11 episodes of the series, nearly four times longer than the Korean War itself, exploring issues like PTSD, sexism, and racism. Swit pushed for a better representation for women.
“One of the things I liked, with Loretta’s prodding, was every time I had a chance to write for her character, we’d get away from the Hot Lips angle and find out more about who Margaret was. She became more of a real person,” Alda told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.
The series ended on a happy note for Houlihan, who spends much of the finale debating whether she wants to head to Tokyo or Belgium for her next overseas post. Ultimately she opts to return to America and work at a hospital, citing her father — a career Army man.
Swit didn’t personally agree that was the correct decision for a military-minded official: “I didn’t think that was correct for my Margaret,” she told Yahoo Entertainment in 2023. “I think her next move was Vietnam. So I didn’t agree with that, but that’s what they wanted her to do.”
But the actor did get to write the speech that Houlihan delivers to her fellow nurses on their final night together, in which she says: “It’s been an honor and privilege to have worked with you. And I’m very, very proud to have known you.”
“I was consumed with writing that. And I still get letters from women all over the world who became nurses because of Margaret Houlihan. To have contributed to someone’s life like that is remarkable,” she told Yahoo Entertainment.
I like the fact that her character developed from a one-dimensional person to someone who was complex, tough, and smart.
Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen.