Tag: Lear

• Sally Struthers, who played Gloria on All in the Family, opened up about her unpleasant memories of creator Norman Lear
• Struthers said that Lear never invited her over for dinner and that he told her he only cast her because she had “blue eyes and a fat face”
• The actress also said she spent $40,000 in legal fees trying to leave All in the Family after the fifth season, but lost and returned for three more seasons

Sally Struthers is getting honest about her time on the series All in the Family and showrunner Norman Lear. On the Jan. 13 episode of Let’s Talk About That! With Larry Saperstein and Jacob Bellotti, the actress, 77, opened up about working with the acclaimed producer, who died in 2023 at age 101. 

Struthers told the podcast hosts that she felt comfortable opening up about him now because “he’s gone.” She noted, “I wasn’t a huge fan of his.” 

“All those years on the show, Norman and his wife would have dinner parties,” she said. They would invite the other stars of the show — Carroll O’Connor, Jean Stapleton and Rob Reiner — and their spouses often. Struthers revealed, “I wasn’t, in eight years, invited to his home. It didn’t feel good.”

Struthers also shared an upsetting exchange she said she had with Lear during the show’s first season, when the series was first finding success. “He was on the sound stage watching us rehearse, and we were on a break,” she said. 

“I said, ‘I can’t believe that we’re doing this and we’re about to hit number one on the air,’ ” she remembered. After noting how he “saw so many young ladies” for her role of Gloria — including Reiner’s then-wife Penny Marshall — she asked Lear, “Was I really the funniest one? And he said, ‘No.’ ”

Lear said that when they were casting the show, they thought it made more sense to have Gloria be a daddy’s girl because O’Connor’s Archie Bunker “was a lot to swallow for American audiences with his bigotry and his social sluts.” They could “soften him up” if he had a “soft spot in his heart for his daughter.”

She remembered that Lear told her, “So we hired you because just like Carroll O’Connor, you have blue eyes and a fat face.” Struthers said she didn’t know how to respond to that and walked away.

Later in the episode, Struthers said that even though she won two Emmys for the series, she was “fourth banana” on the show after the other three leads. She said the show’s “older, brilliant Jewish faith writers” knew how to write for the other characters, but not for “a young lady.”

“I usually had about three lines per show that said, ‘I’ll help you set the table, Ma,’ ‘Michael, where are you going?’ and ‘Oh, Daddy, stop it.’ And then the next week I’d have the three same lines in a different order. And if they literally didn’t know what to do with me in a scene, they’d have me go upstairs to take a bath or wash my hair. It was very frustrating.”

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After five seasons, she took her contract to arbitration in hopes of leaving the show, she shared. She hired a lawyer, but after spending $40,000 on legal fees during arbitration, she lost. “I went back and had three more seasons, but they were by far the most fun for me. Because finally, they had Mike and Gloria have a baby, they had us move next door into the house that [the] Jeffersons lived in,” she said. 

All in the Family ran from 1971 to 1979 and Struthers appeared in 182 episodes. She also appeared in the spinoff Archie Bunker’s Place and her own short-lived spinoff Gloria. She also found TV fans once again decades later for her role as Babette on Gilmore Girls.

Despite her mixed feelings about the series, Struthers said that part of her longevity as an actress is because she was “lucky enough to be on a groundbreaking national television series.” She reunited with Reiner in early 2024 for a tribute to Lear and the series at the delayed 2023 Emmy Awards.

Struthers still does a lot of theater in addition to her TV work in shows like A Man on the Inside, and she said audiences are still “curious” to come see her in person at 77.

She joked, “Maybe because they love you or like you, but just as much because ‘Wait a minute, is she still alive? Let’s go see what she looks like now.’ ”