Actor Jamie Farr famously portrayed the fashionable M*A*S*H character Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger for 11 years, until the show’s final and 11th season, which ended in 1983.
MeTV.com reported that Farr felt anxious about the decision to have Klinger lessen his dress-wearing during the show’s eighth season.
“I was actually pretty nervous when they said they were going to make Klinger the company clerk and cut back quite a bit on the dress jokes,” said the actor, now 92, during a 1981 The Gazette interview, per MeTV.com. “It meant more responsibility and we were all anxious that maybe the audiences wouldn’t go for me out of dresses.”
He clarified that the situation ended up working for his character.
“But like everything else on M*A*S*H, it worked out fine. Klinger still gets into a dress once in awhile, but because it’s less frequent, the impact is greater,” said Farr.
‘M*A*S*H’ Creator Larry Gelbart Shared Insight Into How Jamie Farr Landed the Role of Klinger
In a 1998 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, the creator of M*A*S*H, Larry Gelbart, shared that Farr was immediately thought of to play Klinger. When writing a script for a season 1 episode, he described the character wearing “a uniform of a WAAC Woman’s Auxiliary Corps, which was a World War II unit.”
“He wore a cap and a smart little jacket and a khaki skirt and those great hairy legs and high heels. And turned on his heels and walked away,” recalled Gelbart.
Gelbart said that the show’s executive producer, Gene Reynolds, suggested Farr, who had made guest appearances in I Dream of Jeannie and The Andy Griffith Show, for the part.
He said, however, that when Farr auditioned for the role, he was “misdirected” and didn’t understand that Klinger wore dresses to try to “get out of the army,” not because he wanted to.
“So Gene went back and redirected it and got what was intended. And the rest, I’m sure, is history in Jamie Farr’s family,” said Gelbart, who died at the age of 81 in 2009.
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