RIP Loretta Swit
By 
The actress who immortalized Hot Lips has passed:
Loretta Swit, the Emmy-winning actress who made the high-strung and relentlessly militaristic Maj. Margaret Houlihan human, dignified and, against all odds, sympathetic on the acclaimed television series “M*A*S*H,” died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
Her death was announced by her publicist, Harlan Boll.
In the Oscar-winning 1970 film “M*A*S*H,” directed by Robert Altman, Major Houlihan (whose blatantly sexist nickname was Hot Lips) was played by Sally Kellerman. When the movie became a CBS series, Ms. Swit stepped into the role and made it her own, adding heretofore unseen nuance. She was nominated 10 years in a row for the Emmy Award for best supporting actress in a comedy series, and she won twice, in 1980 and 1982.
“M*A*S*H,” which aired from 1972 through 1983 on CBS, was, like the movie that inspired it, set at a mobile Army hospital during the Korean War. Major Houlihan spent the first five seasons distracted by her open secret of an affair with the sniveling, very married Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville).
M*A*S*H was a huge part of my childhood. I re-watched the series finale last year and it held up, and I re-watched the McLean Stevenson years maybe a decade ago and they were still quite funny. I’d be hesitant to devote much attention to the second half of the series run, however. Swit was obviously an enormous part of all of that, and I’ve never been as bothered by the problem of the Two Margarets (the character in the first half of the series is MUCH different than the character in the second half), as it seemed to me to be a story of change and growth in unspeakably harsh conditions.
It bears mention that Mike Farrell, Jamie Farr, Gary Burghoff, and of course Alan Alda are still with us. Could a donation to LGM forestall the grim spectre of death for one more day? Better safe than sorry!
BTW Farrell and Alda read out a BJ-Hawkeye scene written by ChatGPT a couple years ago. It wasn’t great!