“Farces only work when they’re fast-paced,” she says. With everything going on in the room, her comedic instincts are so strong that if you just give her a short leash, she will color within the lines, but she’ll bring more colors from the crayon box than you can imagine,” Raben says.Īt 75, Struthers still possesses the girlish exuberance she brought to her Emmy-winning role as Gloria Stivic in “All in the Family” (1971-78), and she has no problem keeping up with the rest of the “Clue” cast in the lightning-quick show. “The best part about Sally is that she is always paying attention. It was a take that the director, Larry Raben, hadn’t imagined for the character, but loved the second he heard it. Peacock would talk in this South Carolina voice that makes her sound so involved with herself,” she says, slipping into a coquettish drawl that would melt so much butter on a Southern-style biscuit. This time I wanted to do it a little different. “The last time I just played her with my own voice, but like a little doddering old lady. 1, one daughter)ĭaughter: Samantha Struthers Rader (b.By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. She was also the long-time TV spokesperson for the Christian Children's Fund, raising funds to feed the world's hungry and malnourished children.įather: Robert Alden Struthers (military psychiatrist) For many years, she has struggled with her own weight problems. Struthers married and divorced a psychiatrist, William Rader, who founded the Rader Institute for Eating Disorders. On TV, she took the Lily Tomlin role in a sitcom adaptation of the office comedy Nine to Five, voiced Charlene Sinclair on Dinosaurs, and played a wacky neighbor on Gilmore Girls. On stage, she toured as Miss Hannigan in Annie, and starred on Broadway as Florence Ungar opposite Rita Moreno as Olive Madison in a gender-reversed Odd Couple that ran more than a year. She has never again achieved anything close to her 1970s success as Gloria, a role she eventually returned to in a short-lived spin-off sitcom, but Struthers has worked steadily over the years. She won two Emmys as Gloria, but left All in the Family in 1978 after a salary dispute.įor several years during and after All in the Family she was the veritable queen of made-for-TV movies, including the disease-of-the-week classic Aloha Means Goodbye with James Franciscus, the wife-beating saga Intimate Strangers with Dennis Weaver, and the true but tedious tale of two travelers stranded after a plane crash in the Yukon, Hey, I'm Alive! with Ed Asner. In 1971, she landed the role that has defined her, as the curly-haired, sometimes squealing sometimes wise Gloria Stivic, daughter of Archie and Edith Bunker and wife of Meathead on the huge hit All in the Family. In Struthers' second film, Five Easy Pieces, she had sex with Jack Nicholson. She made her film debut with a tiny part in the bizarrely awful The Phynx, in which an alleged rock'n'roll band goes undercover to rescue celebrities like Colonel Sanders and Xavier Cugat, who have been kidnapped by communists. Then, a year after The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had been abruptly cancelled for showing too much irreverence at CBS, it was given a brief reprise at ABC, with Struthers in the sketch comedy cast, before being cancelled again. She appeared in numerous commercials, and voiced the hot teenaged Pebbles Flintstone on The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, with former Dennis the Menace Jay North voicing Bamm-Bamm. In one of her early jobs, she was a dancing girl in a TV special starring Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. For several years she worked as a dancer, augmenting her income with office work while taking acting lessons at the Pasadena Playhouse. And like most, she was unable to find work as an actress. Like many pretty young women, Sally Struthers came to Hollywood as soon as she finished high school, determined to make her name in show business.
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