Loretta Swit

Loretta: I do what I do because I love it. I am at peace with it and I have found my niche.

Loretta: I am away from it. That perception is the audience's or the world's, not mine. Margaret was just another character for me.

Loretta: I don't eat or wear animals, but I never tell people not to...that's just my view.

Loretta: 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", 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" changed both characters, so that they were never really rivals again.

Loretta: 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.

Loretta: I just can't wait to get out there on stage. There's no anxiety at all. I love being able to take this journey with the audience, because we all have a ball with it-- even if we're crying.

Loretta: 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.

Loretta: M*A*S*H offered real characters and everybody identified with them because they had such soul. The humor was intelligent and it always assumed that you had an intellect.

Loretta: So much of life is luck. One day you make a right turn and get hit by a car. Turn left and you meet the love of your life. I think I made the correct turn.

Loretta: It wasn't so much that I was alone on stage, but it was the realization of how much you need the response...you need the audience to tell you where to go.