Biographie

Wanted to leave M*A*S*H (1972) after the 8th season, but FOX wouldn't let her out of her contract. She has said that she wanted to star in the series Cagney & Lacey (1981), after she made the pilot movie, but her MASH commitment prevented her from doing so.

During a M*A*S*H (1972) season hiatus, Loretta starred as "Chris Cagney" in the pilot episode of Cagney & Lacey (1981) in 1981. She wanted to leave the sitcom, which was in its ninth season, to star as the police officer when the pilot was picked up. However, the "M*A*S*H" producers wouldn't let her go. Meg Foster subbed in for Loretta, who in turn was replaced by Sharon Gless.

She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Television at 6240 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on August 1, 1989.

Her outspoken stand against the killing of fur-bearing animals for high-fashion wear has been rewarded with acknowledgments from the American Humane Society and the Animal Protection Institute of America. In addition, she teamed with Robert Redford for a PBS special centering on animal species that were threatened with extinction and is an active board member for Actors and Others for Animals, and other similar organizations.

Was in attendance at the wedding of Robert Wagner to Jill St. John.

Hot Lips changed a lot in eleven years. Initially Margaret Houlihan behaved as though a man were the only thing that could complete her life, and she didn't see what richness her life contained. She gained a lot of self-esteem through the years, and she came to realize that what she did, what she offered, was valuable. To oversimplify it, I took each traumatic change that happened in her life and kept it. I didn't discard anything. I didn't go on into the next episode as if it were a different character in a different play. She was a character in constant flux. She never stopped developing.

I mean, certain things had to remain the same. She had to remain one of the antagonists because that was the structure of the show. In the second season, we saw for the first time that she was unhappy with "Frank" and wanted more from her life. Then around the third or fourth year, in an episode called The Nurses (1976), "Hot Lips" gave the nurses a speech telling them how lonely she was because she was in charge and that's the way it was, so she couldn't really have any friends. Her marriage and her divorce changed her. Her affair with "Hawkeye" in Comrades in Arms: Part 1 (1977) changed both characters, so that they were never really rivals again.

Sometimes I would get letters from nurses saying how grateful they were that a nurse was finally being portrayed as a person, a caring human being. As far as the audience was concerned, I think it identifies with at least one or two or maybe all of us. We have become people to them and never caricatures. We're very real to them.

Larry Linville and I were very deep friends. Very often we would go behind the tents on the TV series M*A*S*H (1972) to work out scenes and then bring them to the Director.

I always wanted to be an actress. Luckily, my mother loved movies and we would go to double features and sit through both films twice.