Loretta Swit: Beloved M*A*S*H actor who play Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan dead aged 87

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Loretta Swit: Beloved M*A*S*H actor who play Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan dead aged 87

One of TV’s most beloved actors, Loretta Swit, famed for her portrayal of Margaret Houlihan on the ground-breaking TV series M*A*S*H, has died.

Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan was a cornerstone role for Loretta Swit as she rose to fame, and along with Alan Alda become the longest-serving member of the cast, during the show’s 11-year run.

Ms Swit who won two Emmy awards for her portrayal of Houlihan, died at her home in New York on Friday at the age of 87.

Her publicist Harlan Boll said Ms Swit’s passing was likely from natural causes.

M*A*S*H ran on TV screens around the world from 1972 to 1983 and revolved around life at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, which gave the show its name.

The two-and-a-half-hour finale on February 28, 1983 is still the most-watched episode of any scripted series ever.

In Robert Altman’s 1970 film, Margaret Houlihan was a one-dimensional character — a sex-crazed bimbo who earned the nickname “Hot Lips”. Her intimate moments were broadcast to the entire camp after somebody planted a microphone under her bed.

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. The ******* appetite was played down and she wasn’t even called “Hot Lips” in the later years.

The growing awareness of feminism in the 1970s spurred Houlihan’s transformation from caricature to real person, but a lot of the change was due to Swit’s influence on the scriptwriters.

“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.

“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.”

With AAP.

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