Loretta Swit who played Houlihan on pioneering TV series M.A.S.H dies aged 87
Loretta Swit, who won two Emmy Awards playing Major Margaret Houlihan on the pioneering hit TV series M.A.S.H, has died aged 87.
Publicist Harlan Boll said Swit died on 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 two-and-a-half-hour finale on February 28 1983 lured over 100 million viewers, the most-watched episode of any scripted series ever.
Rolling Stone magazine put M.A.S.H at No 25 of the best TV shows of all time, while Time Out put it at No 34.
It won the Impact Award at the 2009 TV Land annual awards, as well as a Peabody Award in 1975 'for the depth of its humour and the manner in which comedy is used to lift the spirit and, as well, to offer a profound statement on the nature of war'.
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 was not even called 'Hot Lips' in the later years.
The growing awareness of feminism in the seventies 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.
After the TV series, Swit became a vocal animal welfare activist, selling SwitHeart perfume and her memoir through her official website, with proceeds benefitting various animal-related non-profit groups.
In 1983, she married actor Dennis Holahan, whom she had met when he was a guest star on M.A.S.H. They divorced in 1995.
Born in Passaic, New Jersey, the daughter of Polish immigrants, Swit enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, then paid her dues for years in touring productions.
In 1969, she arrived in Hollywood and was soon seen in series such as Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-O, Mission Impossible and Bonanza before she got her big break with M.A.S.H in 1972.
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