Loretta Swit, Emmy-winner who played Houlihan on TV's M*A*S*H, has died at 87
NEW YORK — 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.
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Publicist Harlan Boll says Swit died Friday at her home in New York City, likely from natural causes.
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Swit and Alan Alda were the longest-serving cast members on M*A*S*H, which was based on Robert Altman's 1970 film, itself based on a novel by Richard Hooker, the pseudonym of H. Richard Hornberger.
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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 Feb. 28, 1983, lured over 100 million viewers, the most-watched episode of any scripted series ever.
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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. It won a Peabody Award in 1975 'for the depth of its humor 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.'
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In Altman's 1970 film, Houlihan was a one-dimensional character — a prickly, rules-bound head nurse who was regularly tormented by male colleagues, who gave her the nickname 'Hot Lips.' Her intimate moments were broadcast to the entire camp after somebody planted a microphone under her bed.
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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. Her sexuality was played down and she wasn't even called 'Hot Lips' in later years.
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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.
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'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.
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'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.'
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M*A*S*H wasn't an instant hit. It finished its first season in 46th place, out of 75 network TV series, but it nabbed nine Emmy nominations. It was rewarded with a better time slot for its sophomore season, paired on Saturday nights with All in the Family, then TV's highest-rated show. At the 1974 Emmys, it was crowned best comedy, with Alda winning as best comedy actor.
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