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Loretta Swit, who won two Emmy Awards playing Major Margaret Houlihan, the demanding head nurse of a behind-the-lines surgical unit during the Korean War on the pioneering hit TV series M.A.S.H., has died. She was 87.
Publicist Harlan Boll says Swit died Saturday at her home in New York City, likely from natural causes.
Swit and Alan Alda were the longest-serving cast members on M.A.S.H., which was based on Robert Altman’s 1970 film, which was itself based on a novel by Richard Hooker, the pseudonym of H. Richard Hornberger.
The CBS show aired for 11 years from 1972 to 1983, revolving around life at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, which gave the show its name. The two-and-a-half-hour finale on February 28, 1983, lured over 100 million viewers, the most-watched episode of any scripted series ever.
Rolling Stone magazine put M.A.S.H. at No. 25 of the best TV shows of all time, while Time Out put it at No. 34. It won the Impact Award at the 2009 TV Land annual awards. It won a Peabody Award in 1975 “for the depth of its humour and the manner in which comedy is used to lift the spirit and, as well, to offer a profound statement on the nature of war”.
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