To Absent Friends - Loretta Swit

 

Loretta Swit

1937-2025

When I heard the news last week that actress Loretta Swit had died last week at the age of 87, I wasn't inclined to give her an Absent Friends designation, but upon reading her Washington Post obituary and further reflecting upon it, I changed my mind.  Swit's passing must be noted if for no other reason than she was the only female cast member on one of television's great shows. M*A*S*H.  The show ran from 1972 to 1983, and Swit appeared in 251 episodes as the uptight Army nurse Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan who demanded by-the-book behavior from everyone all while having an affair with the married by-the-book surgeon Major Frank Burns.  Hence, the nickname "Hot Lips".

In an interview that was quoted in the Post obit, Swit remarked how that producers of the show, largely at her urging, changed Margaret's character from the sex obsessed Hot Lips to a more rounded professional woman.  This was helped when the Frank Burns character was written out of the series.  The comic features for Margaret Houlihan were still there, but she was on more equal footing with Hawkeye, Trapper, and BJ than she ever was when she was the one dimensional Hot Lips.

IMDB lists 62 acting credits for Loretta Swit, the first one being a 1967 episode of Mannix, along with appearances on such shows as Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-0, Mission: Impossible, and, of course, five separate appearances on The Love Boat.  It was also interesting to learn that she filmed the pilot for the series Cagney & Lacey, was going to get the part of Detective Chris Cagney, but the honchos at CBS would not allow her to leave M*A*S*H.  Actress Sharon Gless was forever grateful for that, no doubt.

In a bit of coincidental serendipity, as I was looking up something else last week in The Grandstander Archives, I came across THIS POST, the Absent Friends post I did in 2022 for actress Sally Kellerman, the original Hot Lips Houlihan. The next day, the news of Loretta Swit's passing came.

RIP Loretta Swit.

Major Margaret Houlihan, RN

4077 MASH Unit

United States Army