Actor Gary Burghoff famously played the lovable and seemingly psychic Corporal Walter Eugene “Radar” O’Reilly on the beloved CBS sitcom, M*A*S*H, which had an 11-season run until 1983. However, Burghoff, now 83, once shared that he found being tied to Radar upsetting.
MeTV.com reported that Burghoff discussed his exit from the series in its eighth season, while speaking to The Desert Sun. He suggested that he wanted to differentiate himself from his iconic M*A*S*H character.
“It had nothing to do with M*A*S*H. It had to do with what Gary wanted to do for himself and his family,” said Burghoff, who also played Radar in the 1970 M*A*S*H film. “When the whole world begins to refer to you as Radar, you begin to wonder if Gary exists. That was disturbing… All of a sudden, if Gary Burghoff wasn’t a household name, Radar was.”
According to MeTV.com, Burghoff also told The Desert Sun that he wasn’t interested in “being a celebrity.”
“I find being a person is more important than being a celebrity. A celebrity, in my mind, is a person who wears $300 jackets, drives Rolls-Royces and lives a certain lifestyle. He never thinks about his family and that lifestyle,” said Burghoff. “What I tend to be shy of is too many bright lights and too many parties. It’s just not part of my personality. It takes a certain type of person to be a celebrity, and I’m just not that type. If being a celebrity interferes with that closeness and warmth, then I don’t want to be a celebrity. I just want to be Gary.”
Gary Burghoff Shared an Interaction He Had With a Korean War Veteran
In a 2016 interview with MeTV, Burghoff shared he received “the greatest compliment” about M*A*S*H from a veteran who served in the Korean War. He said he was approached by the veteran in a parking lot. According to Burghoff, he was told that happenings of the 4077th MASH unit in the show were accurate to what occurred.
“He said, ‘I was in the trenches in Korea.’ And I knew enough about the trenches in Korea, to know immediately that this was a man who had been through serious trauma, because that was a living hell. And he said, ‘When I came back home in 1952, I was changed, and my wife knew that I needed to talk about it. And I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it,'” recalled the actor. “And he said, ‘When your show came on the air, many years later, it was the first time that I could reach over and touch her on the arm and say, ‘See, honey, that’s the way it was.’ That was the greatest compliment that we could ever have because we always tried to tie the entertainment value into the reality, as much as we possibly could in our small way.”
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