Loretta Swit Cause of Death: Beloved M*A*S*H Actress Passes Away

Reading Time: 3 minutes

We have sad news from the world of television today, as Loretta Swit has passed away.

The actress — who portrayed Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the iconic sitcom M*A*S*H — was 87 years old.

News of Swit’s passing comes to us courtesy of her publicist, Harlan Boll, who noted that he spoke with Swit the previous evening and did not detect anything amiss.

No cause of death was given, but a police report obtained by USA Today indicated that Swit appeared to have died of natural causes.

Loretta Swit’s epic career spanned decades

Born in New Jersey in 1937, Swit moved to Los Angeles in 1970 to try and make it as an actress.

She quickly found work, appearing in small roles on such popular series as Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Gunsmoke, and Hawaii Five-O.

The attention she received from those performances helped her to land the female lead on a CBS sitcom that would go on to become one of the most popular shows in TV history.

American actor, director and writer Alan Alda in the driving seat of a jeep, surrounded by Loretta Swit and other cast members of the hit television show M.A.S.H, in costume as members of a US Army medical corp. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

“She was [unique] at the time and in her time, which was the ’50s, when [the Korean War] was happening,” Swit said of her M*A*S*H character in a 2004 interview at the TV Academy Foundation (per The Hollywood Reporter).

“And she became even more unique, I think, because we allowed her to continue to grow — we watched her evolve. I don’t think that’s ever been done in quite that way.”

Swit won two Emmys for her work on M*A*S*H, and along with Alan Alda, she was one of only two stars to have appeared in both the show’s pilot and its final episode.

Loretta Swit attends the 2015 Farm Sanctuary Gala at The Plaza Hotel on October 24, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Grant Lamos IV/Getty Images)

She continued to act throughout the ’80s and ’90s, accumulating dozens of film and television roles.

Swit came close to starring in two classic series, as she portrayed one of the title roles in the pilot for Cagney & Lacey, but her contract with M*A*S*H prevented her from continuing when the show got picked up a year later.

Though she had not appeared on television in over 20 years, news of Swit’s death made her an instant trending topic on social media as friends, fans, and colleagues rushed to pay tribute.

Our thoughts go out to her loved ones during this enormously difficult time.