Loretta Swit

The Contract That Held Back a Detective

Loretta Swit landed on the set of M*A*S*H in 1972 with a theater background few suspected. She had studied with Gene Frankel and performed on Broadway in productions such as Any Wednesday. But the general public immediately identified her with the military rigidity of Margaret Houlihan.

For eleven years, she played the head nurse in a show that evolved from raucous comedy into the most raw human drama. Swit was the only woman from the original cast who stayed on screen until the series ended in 1983. She did it by negotiating every nuance of her character to keep her from falling into the sexist caricature of the early scripts.

She was the only woman who kept up with the pace of the eleven years of filming.

In 1981, she filmed the pilot episode of Cagney & Lacey, playing detective Christine Cagney. Critics praised her chemistry with Tyne Daly, and the project got the green light right away. But Fox executives refused to release her from her contract on the war series. So she had to watch from the sidelines as Sharon Gless took her place and won two Emmy Awards for the role.

In Hollywood, exclusive contracts are often gilded cages that are hard to escape. Swit returned to the Korean army tents while her fellow actors explored new roles in the competition.

Genre Films and the Refuge of the Stage

Beyond television, she tried to break out of her typecast with projects of a very different tone. In 1974, she appeared in Freebie and the Bean, an action film that performed well at the box office. Later, in 1981, she worked under Blake Edwards in S.O.B., playing a gossip reporter. That film was a head-on attack on the movie industry she knew well.

The industry never forgave her for being Margaret Houlihan.

After her television years ended, she turned to the stage to regain control of her career. In 1988, she starred in the female version of The Odd Couple on Broadway. Casting directors kept calling her for authority roles, but she preferred the freedom of national tours. In 1991, she appeared in the film Hell Hath No Fury and continued to appear intermittently on television.

Her career branched out into painting and animal rights advocacy. In 1986, she published A Needlepoint Scrapbook, a technical book on embroidery that revealed a creative side far from the spotlight. And although many assumed she had retired, she never stopped working on independent projects.

In 2019, she returned to the stage in the play Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks at a theater in Florida. The production demanded considerable physical effort from an actress who was already over eighty (she was born in 1937 in Passaic, New Jersey). But the rehearsal pace was no obstacle to completing all the scheduled performances.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2022, she lent her voice to the documentary M*A*S*H: When Television Changed Forever, where she analyzed the show's technical impact. During that shoot, it was noted that the series finale in 1983 earned a 77 percent share of the audience. A total of 105.9 million viewers tuned in to CBS that February night.