Loretta Swit

Loretta Swit, born Loretta Jane Szwed on November 4, 1937, in Passaic, New Jersey, was an American stage and television actress whose career spanned Broadway, regional theater, and decades of television work. She died on May 30, 2025, at her home in New York City at the age of 87. Her parents, Nellie and Lester Szwed, were both of Polish descent, and her father worked as a salesman and upholsterer. Swit had one brother, Robert, who was six years and one day her senior.

Swit graduated from Pope Pius XII High School in Passaic in 1955, where she had been a cheerleader, co-captain of the girls' basketball team, and a participant in theatrical productions. She went on to graduate from Katharine Gibbs School in Montclair, New Jersey, in June 1957. During the years that followed, she held a range of clerical positions, including work as a stenographer in Bloomfield, New Jersey, personal secretary to Elsa Maxwell, secretary to the ambassador from Ghana to the United Nations, and a position at the American Rocket Society in New York City. Simultaneously, she began training in dance with a classmate, Elizabeth Parent-Barber, a Rockette and student at the New York School of Ballet. She studied drama with Gene Frankel in Manhattan, whom she considered her acting coach, and she trained as a singer at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Her stage career began off-Broadway with a role in the Actors Playhouse production of An Enemy of the People. In 1961, she appeared in the Circle in the Square production of The Balcony, written by Jean Genet and produced by José Quintero. She subsequently toured with the national company of Any Wednesday in 1967, starring alongside Gardner McKay, and followed that engagement by playing one of the Pigeon sisters opposite Don Rickles and Ernest Borgnine in a Los Angeles run of The Odd Couple. Swit's Broadway career extended from 1964 to 1985 and included productions of Any Wednesday, Mame, Same Time, Next Year, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In 1975, she appeared in Same Time, Next Year on Broadway opposite Ted Bessell, and she performed in The Mystery of Edwin Drood during the 1980s. She also played Agnes Gooch in the Las Vegas production of Mame, which starred Susan Hayward and later Celeste Holm. In October and November 2003, she took on the title role in North Carolina Theatre's production of Mame in Raleigh, North Carolina. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the 2010s, she performed in various productions and revivals of Shirley Valentine, a one-woman play. In August and September 2010, she starred in the world premiere of Mark Miller's play Amorous Crossing at the Alhambra Dinner Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida, directed by Tod Booth. In 2016 and 2017, she appeared in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks at Totem Pole Playhouse in Fayetteville, Pennsylvania, and in Buffalo, New York, respectively.

Swit arrived in Hollywood in 1969 and began accumulating television credits through guest roles in series including Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, and Mannix. Her first television credit was a guest appearance in Hawaii Five-O, in which she played Wanda Russell in the episode "Three Dead Cows at Makapuu," which aired on February 25, 1970. Beginning in 1972, she took on the role that would define much of her public identity: Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan in the television series M*A*S*H, a comedy-drama set in a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. The role had previously been portrayed by Sally Kellerman in the feature film. Swit was one of only four cast members to remain with the series for all 11 seasons, from 1972 to 1983, alongside Alan Alda, Jamie Farr, and William Christopher. She and Alda were the only performers to appear in both the pilot episode and the series finale, and she appeared in all but 11 of the show's 256 episodes. Her work on M*A*S*H earned her Emmy Award nominations across each season of the series, and she won the award twice, in 1980 and 1982. In 1981, she played Christine Cagney in the movie pilot for Cagney & Lacey, but contractual obligations prevented her from continuing in the role for the television series. In 1988, she hosted the documentary Korean War—The Untold Story on PBS and traveled to South Korea to film it, becoming the first M*A*S*H cast member to visit the country since Jamie Farr's military service there in the mid-1950s. In 1989, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1991, she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theater. In 1992, she hosted the 26-part series Those Incredible Animals on the Discovery Channel.

Beyond her performing career, Swit was an animal rights activist and had been a vegetarian for many years before becoming a vegan in 1981. She authored A Needlepoint Scrapbook, published by Doubleday in 1986, and SwitHeart: The Watercolour Artistry & Animal Activism of Loretta Swit, published in 2017. She married actor Dennis Holahan in 1983; the two divorced in 1995. Holahan had appeared in an episode of M*A*S*H as a Swedish diplomat briefly involved with Swit's character.