Special Guest Blogger: Loretta Swit

I went from Loretta Szwed to Swit to Houlihan to Holahan and back to Szwed during my 87 years with each surname summing up my life into neat little parcels of time.
Szwed was when i was had been a high school cheerleader and captain of the girl's basketball team and then when I was employed at a variety of clerical jobs including the secretary to the ambassador from Ghana to the United Nations.
Then i Americanised my name to Swit when i began acting on Broadway before becoming the name most people know me as, Margaret 'Hot Lips' Houlihan in MASH.
I played a strong, complicated, occasionally lipstick-wielding woman in a military hospital during the Korean War who could cry on cue, scream into a P.A. system but of course, being known primarily for screaming CAPTAIN! across a compound isn’t exactly the kind of legacy poets write sonnets about. But hey, Hot Lips! Like I was some sort of exotic cocktail garnish. I wasn’t even particularly hot in those days, my lips were chapped from the wind and my hair was permanently frizzed from humidity and trauma. But sure, call me Hot Lips. I’ll take it. I earned it.
For eleven years, from 1972 to 1983 and for all but 11 of the 256 episodes of the show, I woke up, put on an army uniform that fitted like a sausage casing, memorised dialogue that swung from hilarious to heartbreaking in the span of a commercial break and all in a fake tent in California.
Only Alan Alda, Jamie Farr, William Christopher and myself started and finished the series and every season I was nominated for an Emmy Awards and won two, in 1980 and 1982.
In 1981, I played the role of Christine Cagney in the movie pilot for the television series Cagney & Lacey, but was my contract with MASH meant i wasn't able to play the role in the television series but when MASH ended in 1983 i went from Houlihan to Holahan when i married actor Dennis Holahan, the guy who played Per Johannsen, a Swedish diplomat with an embarrassing injury who became briefly involved with Hot Lips in an episode of MASH.
I did carry on doing TV work and milked the MASH reunions for all it was worth and even wrote a couple of Books but of the main twelve members of the MASH cast, there are now only four left as I bugged out from natural causes which will make the next MASH televised reunion a much quicker show.