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The American actor Loretta Swit, who has died aged 87, achieved worldwide fame as Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, head nurse with a mobile army hospital during the Korean war, in the TV sitcom M*A*S*H. She appeared in all 11 series, from 1972 to 1983 – longer than the conflict that inspired it – taking over the role played by Sally Kellerman in the 1970 film.
Misogyny ran throughout the big-screen version of M*A*S*H in a way that was not present in the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker on which it was based.In the TV version, too, Major Houlihan, a strict disciplinarian, was the butt of sexist jokes from the surgeons and other men in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit, particularly “Hawkeye” Pierce (played by Alan Alda). Swit – who had the only leading female role in the show – took a stand before the fifth series began. She was then allowed to contribute to her character’s development, making Houlihan more three-dimensional, warm and brave. “I am a feminist, from the top of my head to the bottom of my toenail, and I favour playing strong women,” she told the American magazine Closer Weekly in 2022.
From then on, Swit’s character was referred to mainly by her real name rather than as “Hot Lips” and a more human side emerged when Houlihan broke down in front of her nurses, confessing she was hurt by the disdain they held for her because of her stern manner. The character’s long-running relationship with Major Frank Burns (Larry Linville) ended and she married Lieutenant Colonel Donald Penobscott (first played by Beeson Carroll and then Mike Henry), whom she later divorced when he cheated on her. Swit’s performance won her two Emmy awards as outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series, in 1980 and 1982.
She might have had global recognition for a second TV role, in a programme that was groundbreaking for its portrayal of women, if the M*A*S*H producers had not refused to let her out of her contract. Swit played the police detective Christine Cagney, alongside Tyne Daly as Mary Beth Lacey, in the feature-length 1981 pilot of Cagney & Lacey. It was the first American police drama to feature women in the two lead roles. In Cagney & Lacey, there was gritty realism and the authenticity of women balancing their work and home lives but, as Swit was unavailable, Meg Foster took over as Cagney when the series began, replaced after six episodes by Sharon Gless.
Swit never had another starring vehicle. “Actors are always identified with certain parts,” she said. “To some, Marlon Brando will always be the Godfather. That’s just how it is.”
Perhaps her best film role was as the first female American president – succeeding a former circus clown, a parody of Ronald Reagan – in Whoops Apocalypse (1986), the writers Andrew Marshall and David Renwick’s variation on their British sitcom.
Loretta was born in Passaic, New Jersey, to parents of Polish descent, Nellie (nee Kassack) and Lester Szwed, an upholsterer, who anglicised the family name to Swit. She attended Pope Pius XII high school, Passaic, where she appeared in school plays, and Gibbs College, Montclair, New Jersey, then had various secretarial jobs. Moving to New York, she trained in acting with Gene Frankel at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, graduating in 1959. Her break in New York theatre came off-Broadway, at the Circle in the Square in 1961 when she joined the cast of the long-running Actors’ Playhouse production of The Balcony, by Jean Genet.
She spent the rest of the decade exclusively on stage until travelling to Hollywood in 1969. Then, she began to get small roles on television, including three in Hawaii Five-O (between 1969 and 1972) and two in Gunsmoke (both in 1970).
Later, she starred on Broadway as Doris in Bernard Slade’s “annual adultery” play Same Time, Next Year (Brooks Atkinson theatre, 1975-76), taking over the role originated by Ellen Burstyn. The New York Times observed that she gave a “stylish impersonation” of Burstyn, who had won a Tony award for her performance.
Swit was on Broadway again in Rupert Holmes’s musical version of Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Imperial theatre, 1985-86), replacing Cleo Laine in the dual roles of the Princess Puffer and Miss Angela Prysock. One stage part that seemed made for Swit was the title character in the British playwright Willy Russell’s one-woman show Shirley Valentine, which she took first in Chicago (Wellington and Wisdom Bridge theatres, 1990), then on an American tour (1995) and Canadian stages (1997 and 2010). The role of the bored Liverpool housewife escaping her humdrum life and uncaring husband had been played in the West End of London and the film version by Pauline Collins, who also took it to Broadway. Swit said of the character: “A lot of her experiences are universal – her ambition and desire, her lust for life and feelings of frustration at not fulfilling certain aspects of her own potential. I had kinship with her the moment I read the script.”
Eve Ensler’s comic and at times seriously political play The Vagina Monologues had Swit as one of the three women taking multiple roles, first at the Westside theatre in New York (1999), then in the West End (Arts theatre, 2001-02) and on an American tour (2002-03).
The actor was a passionate animal activist and supported many charities, as well as setting up her own, SwitHeart Animal Alliance. Her book SwitHeart: The Watercolour Artistry & Animal Activism of Loretta Swit was published in 2017.
Swit’s 1983 marriage to the actor and lawyer Dennis Holahan ended in divorce 12 years later.
