There are TV stars whose passing seems to catch us by surprise even when they die at 87. When the hell, we think upon hearing the sad news, did Loretta Swit turn 87? How can I still have a crush on somebody who is 87?
Yet there it is. Swit, the coroner declared, died at her New York home a minute past midnight on May 30, at the age of 87.
The two-time Emmy Award-winning actress was best known, of course, for her 11 seasons as Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the CBS comedy M*A*S*H. The series ran from 1972 to 1983 and as audiences continue to fragment will likely forever hold the record for the biggest series finale of all time with an estimated 121.6 million viewers.
M*A*S*H had a large ensemble of gifted actors plus quite a turnover of principle characters over its 11-season run. What the series did better than most long-running shows was not just change cast members but change characters. The writer-producers always made sure that the next commander or surgeon or whoever was nothing like the one who just left.
Over the decades, M*A*S*H seemed to age better than many of its contemporary comedies. Set during the Korean War of the early 1950s, it was a period piece that was really commenting on the war in Vietnam, still raging as the series went to air. Just as the space opera Star Trek jumped between centuries in holding a mirror up to racial or other contemporary issues, M*A*S*H also benefitted from having kind of a timeless quality.
M*A*S*H remained a big draw on channels such as the History Network through decades of reruns. It is one of those shows, like Friends and Seinfeld (and the original evergreen, I Love Lucy), that found a new generation of viewers beyond its original Boomer base.
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Part of the reason, I believe, is that the characters are so fixed in our imaginations that they remain frozen in time. The same holds true for some of the actors who play them. Alan Alda, now 89, got greyer as a PBS host and in short runs on dramas such as The West Wing and Damages but never again played a TV character as vibrant as wise-cracking Hawkeye Pierce. The same seems true of Swit, who grew way beyond the outrage and frustration shown by Sally Kellerman in the original movie version of Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H” (1970).
Swit’s characterization began that way but then took on more of a modern feminist role, a mature mentor for the other nurses on the series. She changed, but she didn’t necessarily age. She quickly outgrew her army affair with that spineless boob Major Burns (Larry Linville) and kept maturing past her short-lived marriage to long-forgotten Lieutenant Colonel Donald Penobscott.
Swit never played another long-running part on series television. She was almost half of Cagney & Lacey but was bumped out of the Det. Cagney role post-pilot when the M*A*S*H producers wouldn’t let her out of her contract. (Meg Foster, and later Sharon Gless took over the Cagney role).
She would show up later on The Love Boat or an episode of Murder, She Wrote or Diagnosis Murder but not often enough to pull viewers out of her Houlihan prime.
Swit perhaps benefitted from looking older than she was on M*A*S*H and never appearing to age much afterwards until, low and behold, she was suddenly 87. And that’s why her death hits so hard. We love those stars who seem to cheat time because it helps some of us feel a bit younger still as well. The world spins so fast that we cling to any illusion that we are all still in a series set in an earlier time, even though it is really commenting on the fix we are in today.
Who is still left from the main original M*A*S*H cast? Besides Alda: Gary Burghoff (Radar O’Reilly), who is 82; Jamie Farr (Corporal Klinger), now 90; and Mike Farrell Captain B.J. Hunnicutt), 86. Gone are Harry Morgan (Col. Sherman Potter) died in 2011 at 96. David Ogden Stiers (Major Charles Winchester) was 75 when he died in 2018. Larry Linville (Major Burns) was just 60 when he died in 2000. William Christopher (Father Mulcahy) died in 2016 at 84. Wayne Rogers (Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre) died in 2015 at 82. And finally, McLean Stevenson (Col. Henry Blake) was 68 when, like his character, he was the first to pass away in 1996.
