Loretta Swit

Loretta Jane Szwed was born on November 4, 1937, in Passaic, New Jersey, to Nellie (née Kassack) and Lester Szwed, both of Polish descent. Her father worked as a salesman and upholsterer. Her brother Robert was six years and one day older than her. As a girl she belonged to a Girl Scout troop sponsored by Holy Rosary Church in Passaic. At Pope Pius XII High School she was a cheerleader, appeared in school productions and was co-captain of the girls' basketball team, graduating in 1955.

After high school she graduated from the Katharine Gibbs School in Montclair, New Jersey, in June 1957. While working clerical jobs, including as a stenographer, as personal secretary to Elsa Maxwell, as secretary to Ghana's ambassador to the United Nations and at the American Rocket Society, she trained in dance with a Rockette classmate and studied acting. She trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and studied drama in Manhattan with Gene Frankel, whom she regarded as her acting coach and whose studio she kept returning to throughout her career to talk with young actors.

Swit began off-Broadway in An Enemy of the People at the Actors Playhouse, and in 1961 joined the Circle in the Square production of Jean Genet's The Balcony, produced by José Quintero. In 1967 she toured with the national company of Any Wednesday and played one of the Pigeon sisters in a Los Angeles run of The Odd Couple.

She moved to Hollywood in 1969, with early television credits on Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, Mannix and Bonanza. In 1972 she was cast as Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan on CBS's M*A*S*H, a role created on film by Sally Kellerman. She stayed for all eleven seasons, one of only four cast members to do so alongside Alan Alda, Jamie Farr and William Christopher, and appeared in all but 11 of its 256 episodes. The finale, broadcast on February 28, 1983, drew more than 100 million viewers.

Swit helped reshape Houlihan from a one-joke foil into a full character, persuading the writers to end Margaret's affair with Frank Burns, marry her to Lieutenant Colonel Donald Penobscot and let her walk away from a disloyal marriage. She received ten Emmy nominations for the role and won in 1980 and 1982.

In 1981 she played Christine Cagney in the television film that launched Cagney & Lacey, but contractual obligations kept her from the series. Her other screen work included Freebie and the Bean (1974), Race with the Devil (1975), S.O.B. (1981), Beer (1985), Whoops Apocalypse (1986) and Forest Warrior (1996), plus more than 25 television films such as Games Mother Never Taught You and A Killer Among Friends. She guest starred on The Muppet Show and The Love Boat and was a regular game show panelist on Match Game, Pyramid, Password, Win, Lose or Draw and Hollywood Squares.

On stage she made her Broadway debut in Same Time, Next Year opposite Ted Bessell in 1975, later appeared in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, played Agnes Gooch in Mame in Las Vegas, and toured for years in the one-woman play Shirley Valentine, giving more than 1,200 performances. Later stage work included Mame in Raleigh in 2003, the premiere of Amorous Crossing in Jacksonville in 2010 and Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks in 2016 and 2017.

Swit was once linked with the musician Bill Hudson. She married the actor Dennis Holahan in 1983, and the couple divorced in 1995. Holahan had appeared on M*A*S*H as Per Johannsen, a Swedish diplomat briefly involved with Margaret Houlihan. After the series ended she and Harry Morgan, who played Colonel Potter, became neighbours, and she stayed close to Alan Alda and his family for the rest of her life. She also painted, and wrote a book on needlepoint.

Swit was a committed animal rights advocate. She was a vegetarian for many years before becoming vegan in 1981. She founded the SwitHeart Animal Alliance to prevent cruelty to animals and to support groups that protect, rescue, train and care for animals and their habitats, and she raised money for animal causes with a perfume, a colouring book and her watercolour book SwitHeart. PETA remembered her as a champion of spay and neuter programmes and a voice for animals in shelters, labs and the wild. She also spoke often of Margaret Houlihan as a feminist role model, calling her "a raging feminist working in a man's world and being her own person."

Swit's Margaret Houlihan is remembered as one of the first fully drawn professional women in a long-running American comedy, a character who grew over eleven seasons in a way that was rare for a sitcom at the time. She said she still received letters from women who became nurses because of the character. Alan Alda credited her with showing the writers how to turn "a one joke sexist stereotype into a real person, with real feelings and ambitions." Her four-hour 2005 interview for the Television Academy Foundation preserves her own account of the show and her career.

Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, 1980 and 1982, from ten nominations for M*A*S*H. Four Golden Globe nominations. Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 1989. Sarah Siddons Award for Chicago theatre, 1991, for Shirley Valentine. Numerous awards from animal welfare organisations for her advocacy.

Swit wrote A Needlepoint Scrapbook (Doubleday, 1986) and SwitHeart: The Watercolour Artistry and Animal Activism of Loretta Swit (2017). She hosted the 1988 documentary Korean War: The Untold Story, filmed in South Korea, and the 26-part Discovery Channel series Those Incredible Animals in 1992. She also appeared in the reunion specials Memories of M*A*S*H (1991) and M*A*S*H: 30th Anniversary Reunion (2002).

Loretta Swit died at her home in New York City on Friday, May 30, 2025, at the age of 87. Her publicist, Harlan Boll, announced her death and said it was believed to be from natural causes, with a report from the coroner's office pending at the time. Tributes came from Alan Alda, Mike Farrell and many others in Hollywood, and from animal welfare groups including PETA.