American actor and singer who played Major Margaret Houlihan – ‘Hot Lips’ – in the 1970 film M*A*S*H
Women in M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s boisterous comedy about a mobile army hospital during the Korean war, tend to get a raw deal. The actor Sally Kellerman, who has died aged 84, was still able to make the best of a thankless role. She received an Oscar nomination for playing the priggish Major Margaret Houlihan, better known by the nickname “Hot Lips”.
In one scene, she is showering in a tent when the canvas is ripped away, exposing her to the rowdy applauding co-workers who have lined up their chairs to watch. “The first take, Sally hit the ground so fast that we couldn’t tell what she was doing,” said the director. For the second one, he and the actor Gary Burghoff stood “on either side of the camera with our pants down, so when the tent went up she saw the two of us standing there naked. That’s why she froze before falling, and how we got the shot we wanted.”
