I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
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Starting in 1972, Swit played the extremely capable head nurse Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan in the television series M*A*S*H, a comedy set in a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Swit inherited the star-making role from actress Sally Kellerman, who had portrayed Houlihan in the feature film. In the first few seasons, her character was single and blindly patriotic, and she had no friends among the camp surgeons and nurses, with the notable exception of her married lover, Major Frank Burns, portrayed by Larry Linville. Over time, her character was considerably softened. She married a lieutenant colonel but divorced soon after. She became good friends with her fellow officers, and her attitude towards the Koreans in and around the camp became more enlightened. The change reflected that of the series in general, from absurdist dark humor to mature comedy-drama. Swit was one of only four cast members to stay for all 11 seasons of the show, from 1972 to 1983 (the others are Alan Alda, Jamie Farr, and William Christopher).
Swit and Alda were the only actors to have been in both the pilot episode and the finale; she appeared in all but 11 of the total of 256 episodes. Swit received two Emmy Awards for her work on M*A*S*H.
She also had a close relationship with Harry Morgan, who played Colonel Sherman T. Potter. They became neighbors after the series ended, until his death on December 7, 2011.Swit remained close to Alda, along with his wife, three daughters, and seven grandchildren.
In 1981, Swit played the role of Christine Cagney in the movie pilot for the television series Cagney & Lacey but was precluded by contractual obligations from continuing the role. Actress Meg Foster portrayed Cagney for the first six episodes of the television series, then Sharon Gless took over the role.
Best known to his many fans for one of his most memorable screen
incarnations--San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan--the actor
and Oscar-winning filmmaker Clint Eastwood is born on this day in 1930, in San
Francisco, California.
With his father, Eastwood wandered the West Coast as a boy during the
Depression. Then, after four years in the Army Special Services, Eastwood went
to Hollywood, where he got his start in a string of B-movies. For eight years,
Eastwood played Rowdy Yates in the popular TV Western series Rawhide,
before emerging as a leading man in a string of low-budget “spaghetti” Westerns
directed by Sergio Leone: Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few
Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). All
three were successful, but Eastwood made his real breakthrough with 1971’s
smash hit Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel. Though he was not the
first choice to play the film’s title role--Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and
Paul Newman all reportedly declined the part--Eastwood made it his own, turning
the blunt, cynical Dirty Harry into an iconic figure in American film.
Also in 1971, Eastwood moved behind the camera, making his directorial debut
with the thriller Play Misty for Me, the first offering from his
production company, Malpaso. Over the next two decades, he turned in solid
performances in films such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Every
Which Way But Loose (1978), Escape From Alcatraz (1979) and Honkytonk
Man (1982), but seemed to be losing his star power for lack of a truly
great film. By the end of the 1980s, after four Dirty Harry sequels,
released from 1973 to 1988, Eastwood was poised to escape the character’s
shadow and emerge as one of Hollywood’s most successful actor-turned-directors.
In 1992, he hit the jackpot when he starred in, directed and produced the
darkly unconventional Western Unforgiven. The film won four Oscars,
including Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Film Editing, Best
Director and Best Picture, both for Eastwood. He also found box-office success
as a late-in-life action and romantic hero, in In the Line of Fire (1993)
and The Bridges of Madison County (1995), respectively.
As a director, Eastwood worked steadily over the next decade, making such
films as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), Absolute
Power (1997) and, most notably, the crime drama Mystic River (2003),
for which he was again nominated for the Best Director Oscar. The following
year, he hit a grand slam with Million Dollar Baby, in which he also
starred as the curmudgeonly coach of a determined young female boxer (Hilary
Swank, in her second Oscar-winning performance). In addition to Swank’s Academy
Award for Best Actress, the film won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (Morgan
Freeman) and Eastwood’s second set of statuettes for Best Director and Best
Picture.
In 2006, Eastwood became only the 31st filmmaker in 70 years to receive a
Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America (DGA). That
year, he directed a pair of World War II-themed movies, Flags of Our Fathers
(2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). The latter film, which
featured an almost exclusively Japanese cast, earned an Oscar nomination for
Best Picture and a fourth Best Director nomination for Eastwood (his 10th
nomination overall).
Off-screen, Eastwood has pursued an interest in politics, serving as mayor
of Carmel, California, from 1986 to 1988. He was married to Maggie Johnson in
1953, and the couple had two children, Kyle and Alison (who co-starred in Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil), before separating in 1978 and divorcing in
1984. Eastwood also had long-term relationships with the actresses Sondra Locke
and Frances Fisher (with whom he had a daughter, Francesca). He married his
second wife, Dina Ruiz Eastwood, in 1996. Their daughter, Morgan, was born that
same year.
June 1, 1980
CNN (Cable News Network), the world's first 24-hour
television news network, makes its debut.
The network signed on at 6 p.m. EST from its headquarters in Atlanta,
Georgia, with a lead story about the attempted assassination of civil rights
leader Vernon Jordan. CNN went on to change the notion that news could only be
reported at fixed times throughout the day. At the time of CNN's launch, TV
news was dominated by three major networks--ABC, CBS and NBC--and their nightly
30-minute broadcasts. Initially available in less than two million U.S. homes,
today CNN is seen in more than 89 million American households and over 160
million homes internationally.
CNN was the brainchild of Robert "Ted" Turner, a colorful,
outspoken businessman dubbed the "Mouth of the South." Turner was
born on November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and as a child moved with his
family to Georgia, where his father ran a successful billboard advertising
company. After his father committed suicide in 1963, Turner took over the
business and expanded it. In 1970, he bought a failing Atlanta TV station that
broadcast old movies and network reruns and within a few years Turner had
transformed it into a "superstation," a concept he pioneered, in
which the station was beamed by satellite into homes across the country. Turner
later bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks basketball
team and aired their games on his network, TBS (Turner Broadcasting System). In
1977, Turner gained international fame when he sailed his yacht to victory in
the prestigious America's Cup race.
In its first years of operation, CNN lost money and was ridiculed as the
Chicken Noodle Network. However, Turner continued to invest in building up the
network's news bureaus around the world and in 1983, he bought Satellite News
Channel, owned in part by ABC, and thereby eliminated CNN's main competitor.
CNN eventually came to be known for covering live events around the world as
they happened, often beating the major networks to the punch. The network
gained significant traction with its live coverage of the Persian Gulf War in
1991 and the network's audience grew along with the increasing popularity of
cable television during the 1990s.
In 1996, CNN merged with Time Warner, which merged with America Online four
years later. Today, Ted Turner is an environmentalist and peace activist whose
philanthropic efforts include a 1997 gift of $1 billion to the United Nations.
I dream about 'Cheers.' Like when you go on a diet and you dream of pizza.
I always think of those wonderful years. I loved working on it.
-George Wendt
George Robert Wendt Jr. October 17, 1948 – May 20, 2025
George Wendt is a 1975 alumnus ofThe Second City, which he discovered shortly after college.A viewing had inspired him to join and on his first day of employment, he showed up promptly at 11:30 a.m. as he was instructed.
The woman working there handed him a broom and said "Welcome to the theater, kid"; thus, his first job in show business was sweeping the floors.Second City, located in Chicago, was also where he met his future wife, Bernadette Birkett, who played Cliff's Halloween date in the third season ofCheersand later in the series played the voice of Norm'snever-seenwife, Vera.
Wendt appeared in the 1980 film My Bodyguard, and had small roles in the TV series Taxi, Soap, and M*A*S*H. In 1982, Wendt landed his first role as a series regular on the CBS sitcom Making the Grade, which was created by Gary David Goldberg. The series was canceled after six episodes in the spring of that year.
From 1982 to 1993, Wendt appeared as Norm Peterson in all 275 episodes of Cheers. For his work on Cheers, Wendt earned six Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He also played the role in the short-lived spin-off The Tortellis, in an episode of Wings, and in an episode of another Cheers spin-off, Frasier.
His first appearance on Saturday Night Live was in a season 11 (1985–1986) episode where he shared hosting duties with director Francis Ford Coppola. In 1988 he played the part of "Witten" in the New Zealand-made film, Never Say Die. In the early 1990s, Wendt made cameo appearances on several episodes of SNL as Bob Swerski, one of the Chicago Superfans (along with cast members Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Robert Smigel, and one-time host, Joe Mantegna).In 1989, Wendt appeared as the eponymous protagonist in a BBC TV dramatization of Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov. He has also appeared twice on the original British edition of Whose Line Is It Anyway? In 1991, Wendt played the father in Michael Jackson's music video "Black or White". He had roles opposite Robert De Niro in 1991's Guilty by Suspicion and with Mel Gibson in 1992's Forever Young.Following his success on Cheers, Wendt starred in the short-lived The George Wendt Show, which featured him as a garage mechanic with a radio show, based on the NPR radio show Car Talk. The George Wendt Show aired from March through April 1995.Wendt starred as the killer in one of the last episodes of the TV series Columbo, portraying a thoroughbred horse owner in the 1995 episode Strange Bedfellows. Wendt appeared as himself on Seinfeld and has reprised the character Norm Peterson on The Simpsons episode "Fear of Flying", two episodes of Family Guy, "Road to Rupert" and "Three Kings", and the Frasier episode "Cheerful Goodbyes". In the same year as his Frasier guest appearance, Wendt played the bartender to Ted Danson's character in Becker (the inverse of their relationship on Cheers). In 1994, he appeared in the film Man of the House as Chet Bronski, the stepfather of Norman (Zachary Browne), and starred with Chevy Chase, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Farrah Fawcett. He also played the role of Old Man Dunphy's closeted homosexual friend Joey in the 1999 film Outside Providence.
In early 1997, Wendt joined the cast of the NBC sitcom The Naked Truth as Les Polonsky, the new owner of the celebrity tabloid where the series' main characters worked. Wendt's role only lasted 13 episodes as The Naked Truth underwent further creative changes for its next season. In 1998, Wendt was one of the three characters in a London West End production of 'Art' with David Dukes and Stacy Keach. He would later join the Broadway production of the play, starring alongside Judd Hirsch and Joe Morton.
In 2003, Wendt appeared as a celebrity fisherman in the music video for Cobra Verde's "Riot Industry" along with Rudy Ray Moore (of "Dolemite" fame) and The Minutemen's Mike Watt. He appeared in several episodes of The WB's Sabrina, The Teenage Witch in 2001 as the title character's boss. He also was the host of the A&E reality show House of Dreams in 2004. In January 2006, Wendt was seen again on television screens as part of the cast of Modern Men.
He has also appeared on The Larry Sanders Show as a guest on the show. In 2006, Wendt made several appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien where he performed short skits. His appearances on Late Night were in all likelihood because the show was having a week-long event in his home town of Chicago. He starred in a 2006 episode of Masters of Horror entitled "Family", directed by John Landis, and played Santa Claus in the ABC Family original film Santa Baby. Wendt performed alongside Richard Thomas in Twelve Angry Men in October 2006 in the Eisenhower Theatre in Washington, D.C.. After the show opened, Wendt was interviewed by local film critic Arch Campbell for a piece on the NBC Washington affiliate WRC. Wendt was asked, "What should people do when they see you around town?" After hesitating for a moment, Wendt held his thumbs up and replied, "If their impulse is to buy me a beer, then by all means, follow that impulse."In spring 2007, Wendt performed in 12 Angry Men in Los Angeles. Wendt appeared as an American GI in the 2007 Christmas Special episode of British sitcom The Green Green Grass.
Wendt appeared in a production of Hairspray, reprising his role as Edna Turnblad, from September 8 to October 9, 2010, at the Charlottetown Festival in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Wendt played Santa in Elf the Musical on Broadway. The show opened November 14, 2010, and ran through January 2, 2011. Wendt starred in a production of Hairspray as Edna Turnblad at Rainbow Stage in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, from August 2, 2011, to August 21, 2011. Wendt also guest-starred in the TV series Hot In Cleveland as Yoder, based on his character Norm in Cheers. His first of two scenes took place in an Amish bar, where everyone in the bar yelled "Yoder!", referencing what the cast of Cheers would yell whenever he walked in.
Wendt is among the thespians who participated in a poster campaign touting live theatre in Chicago. Other celebrities included John Mahoney, John Malkovich, Terry Kinney, and Martha Plimpton. Wendt has a cameo as a newspaper reporter on Portlandia on January 25, 2013. Wendt was set to play the role of Pap in the Hank Williams bio musical Lost Highway at the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse in Auburn, New York.
Beginning in the fall of 2013, Wendt appeared in a television commercial for State Farm Insurance. Wendt and Robert Smigel reprise their roles from SNL as the Chicago Superfans, who encounter quarterback Aaron Rodgers. The commercial continued the theme of State Farm commercials featuring Rodgers, using the "discount doublecheck" slogan.
From November 6, 2013, to January 19, 2014, Wendt starred in Never Too Late, a comedy with his wife, actress Bernadette Birkett, at New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas. In this play, Wendt plays a successful lumber yard owner who is king of his castle and whose life is going exactly the way he wants until his wife comes back from a doctor appointment with some big news.
In 2015, Wendt starred opposite his former Second City co-star Tim Kazurinsky in Bruce Graham's new comedy Funnyman at Northlight Theatre. The same year, Wendt appeared in the TBS sitcom Clipped, which aired for one season.
Wendt appeared as Tracy Turnblad's mother in a production of Hairspray featuring John Waters and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore in June 2016.
Wendt starred in The Fabulous Lipitones at New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas from November 30, 2016, to February 12, 2017.
Wendt starred as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman at St. Jacob's Country Playhouse in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, from October 18 to November 4, 2017.
In 2023, Wendt competed in season nine of The Masked Singer as "Moose" where he was mostly sitting during the performance. He was eliminated on "'80s Night" alongside Christine Quinn of Selling Sunset fame as "Scorpio".
“May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong. And may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”
The series
finale of Newhart, entitled "The Last Newhart",
has been described as one of the most memorable in television history. The
entire town is purchased by a visiting Japanese tycoon, who turns the hamlet
into a huge golf course and recreation resort. Dick and Joanna are the only
townspeople who refuse to leave. The others accept huge payoffs and leave in a
farewell scene which parodies Fiddler on the Roof.
Five years later, Dick and Joanna continue to run the
Stratford Inn, which is now located in the middle of the golf course. The other
townspeople, now richer and odder than before, unexpectedly return for a
reunion. The Darryl brothers also speak for the first time on screen (loudly
yelling "QUIET!" in unison). Dick gets frustrated with the
increasingly chaotic scene, eventually storming out shouting "You're all
CRAZY!" only to be knocked out by a golf ball.
The final scene takes place in a setting previously
seen on The Bob Newhart Show. Bob Newhart
reprises the role of Dr. Bob Hartley, with Suzanne
Pleshettereturning to play Emily, Hartley's wife. Hartley wakes up and
explains his weird dream, apparently revealing that the entire Newhart series
was just a dream in his head. This parodies the infamous Dallas "Dream Season" from a few
years earlier, (and possibly the last episode of St.
Elsewhere, in which the entire series turns out to be the imagination
of an autistic child). There are several references to Newhart's former show,
including the use of its theme song and credits (although The Bob Newhart Show theme was removed
from the final closing credit shot in the series' initial syndication run, the
theme has been reinstated in the current version syndicated by 20th Century Fox Television). In
the MTM logo shown after the closing credits, Mimsie the Cat says what the Darryls shouted
in the series finale.
