Actress Loretta Swit was best known for her portrayal of the empowering M*A*S*H character, Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan.
MeTV.com reported that Swit once explained how she, like Margaret, defied gender-based expectations.
While speaking to The Miami Herald in 1975, Swit, who starred on M*A*S*H throughout its 11-season run until 1983, said she wasn’t interested in marriage or having children, which upset her parents.
“I know what it’s like not to feel that you have any freedom or choice. When I was a child, my family wanted nothing more for me than marriage and at least four kids. When I told them I had other plans, there was a lot of wondering if they’d done something wrong. You know, ‘It must have been something we fed her to make her turn out like this,'” said the actress, who divorced her only husband, Dennis Holahan, in 1995 after 12 years of marriage.
She described the situation as being painful.
“It’s funny, all right, but that’s now. When it’s happening, it hurts. It takes a long time to get over the idea of different as bad, to realize that it can also mean special. I thought that I was a freak for too long not to understand and sympathize with people who feel that way,” said Swit in the 1975 interview, per MeTV.com.
Swit went on to share her belief that “you don’t ever get over your childhood, but you don’t have to be doomed by it.”
“You learn to cope. I was such a quivering mass of fear before… Now, I’m… well, I hate to say I’m happy. Happiness is a by-product. It’s what you get if you just go ahead and be yourself and do the best you can with it,” continued Swit.
Loretta Swit Discussed the Importance of Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan
During a 2005 interview for the Television Academy Foundation, Swit shared that she researched actual nurses that had volunteered to serve in the Korean War to ensure her portrayal of Margaret was as accurate as possible.
“Part of your research, you should know, what you’re doing. If [the doctor] asks for a scalpel, you should know where it is. And you should know how to put it in his hand. You should know how to put on those terrible rubber gloves,” said Swit.
She then said, by mimicking the work of a nurse, she “built up this amazing respect for the real people whom [she was] portraying.”
“I think that probably led me into, you know, really loving this character, what she stood for and what she did,” said the actress in the 2005 interview. “And all those nurses in that period, these women volunteered to be where they were, none of them were drafted. Women had a very small role in the military at that point in time and during that war, and what they did was phenomenal. They were phenomenal. Heroes these women.”
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