A struggling actress at the time, playing Gloria Stivic on ‘All in the Family’ made her a star
All in the Family may have made its debut more than 50 years ago, but the impact of the show was transformative on TV and still being felt today. It brought Archie and Edith Bunker (Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton), along with their daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) and son-in-law Mike Stivic (Rob Reiner) to life in such a way that they became some of the most real characters ever presented on a television sitcom.
For Sally Struthers, who was born on July 28, 1947 in Portland, Oregon, it was an opportunity for steady work and, just as importantly, for the world to get to know her as a performer. But her journey there was not an easy one, as you’ll discover in the facts about the actress — who won two Emmy Awards for her portrayal — below.
Her childhood was not always easy
“Sally Struthers of Portland, Oregon, didn’t have what you’d call a picture book childhood,” offered The Orlando Sentinel in August 1971. “When she was in the third grade, her parents separated, they didn’t get a divorce until she was 17. That’s when her father, a doctor, married his nurse. She loved her father, but he didn’t come around very often. So she would make believe she was sick, so he would come over as family doctor. She thinks part of her acting skill dates from that period, when she got to be pretty good at feigning illness.”
Filling in more of her background was a 1971 edition of The Windsor Star, which wrote, “When Sally Struthers was a youngster, she was determined to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a doctor. As she reached her late teens, she realized that she wasn’t the type for cutting and poking humans, so she began to take every art class available at her Portland, Oregon high school. She decided to become a commercial artist. Sally won an art scholarship for college, but once again she still wasn’t sure about making art her life’s work.”
It was at that point that she decided to apply to the famed Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts and was accepted, being awarded a scholarship that kept her in attendance for two years. “There,” stated The Oregon Daily Journal in 1971, “she played everything from a 10-year-old child to a 90-year-old woman. ‘The training was very valuable, especially when you read for a part. The course was still tough, but we learned makeup, fencing, dancing, dialects, play read, set design … everything.’”
“After the playhouse and before the breaks started coming her way,” added the newspaper, “Sally spent three years going through what most hopefuls face. She tried out for every part that came along, made some commercials and supported herself as a waitress, clerk, telephone solicitor, receptionist and even sold popcorn and candy in a theater and cleaned the restrooms after hours.”
Bad Luck Sally
Things weren’t exactly going smoothly for her. In 1968 she made two films that went unreleased. These were followed by a commercial in which her naturally curly blonde hair was turned into straight brown hair — and then the sponsor elected not to use the commercial.
She nonetheless signed with a couple of agencies to be cast in commercials, and she was: first as a talking lemon followed by her role as a dancing hamburger.
“Then,” The Oregon Daily Journal described, “she auditioned for The Jonathan Winters Show, got the part of the ‘story lady’ and the show was canceled before she got to film a sequence. For six months she survived on the residuals from her early commercial work. And for a while sang with the Spike Jones Jr. Band.”
Things got even worse when her father died and she flew home for the funeral in Portland. When she made the return trip to Los Angeles, she discovered that a commercial job wasn’t happening, the Spike Jones Jr. Band had broken up and she was broke. And it just might have been a good thing, since she found herself cast in a small role in the Jack Nicholson film Five Easy Pieces. “I’m very proud to be in it, although I’m only on the screen for five minutes at the most, people remember,” she said.
Summer and fall TV roles
Thanks to Five Easy Pieces she found herself signed with Creative Management Associates (CMA), and within two months she booked work on the summer Smothers Brothers Show and the fall Tim Conway Hour, finding herself in a position that was quite different than she was used to.
“All of a sudden, after three years of wandering around Hollywood,” she said, “I had so many offers coming in that I couldn’t keep up.” Unfortunately, the gigs didn’t last. Neither did the shows.
‘Yabba-dabba-doozy!’
From 1971 to 1972, Struthers provided her voice to the character of Pebbles Flintstone on The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, a Saturday morning cartoon that was a spin-off of The Flintstones. The series had Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Rubble (voiced by former Dennis the Menace star Jay North) as teenage versions of the babies introduced on the original series. As such, they dealt with high school in Bedrock and found themselves in comic misadventures, trying to start a band and so on. Also, Pebbles offered her own twist on her dad’s catchphrase, changing it to, “Yabba-dabba-doozy!” The actress actually left the show during its run when a pilot she filmed was given the green light to go to series. Its name? All in the Family.
Those were the days
On All in the Family, as previously noted, Sally Struthers was cast as Archie Bunker’s little girl, Gloria Stivic, married to Rob Reiner’s Mike Stivic. “We dated a few times a year ago,” she related to The Oregon Daily Journal with a laugh, “and now I’m married to him.”
“I read for All in the Family with 100 other actresses,” Struthers told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 1974. “It narrowed down to four of us. No word until two weeks before the rehearsals when the director called, ‘You’ve got the part.’ I was crazy with excitement. I could fill my refrigerator again.”
After a rough beginning ratings-wise, the show became one of the biggest hits of the 1970s and helped to transform television as a medium. By the end of the second season in 1972, though, it was clear that she wasn’t entirely satisfied with how the part of Gloria had developed. “The rest of the people in the cast are very real,” she told The Miami Herald. “I know people like Archie and Edith. I know people like Mike — he’s a liberal bigot and I’ve met lots of them. But Gloria? I’m not sure I know Gloria. I can’t believe that all there is to her is that she stands around saying nothing but, ‘Mike’s right, Daddy’ and ‘Daddy, you should be ashamed of yourself.’ There’s got to be more to her than that. All I know is that she loves Mike and she’s about 20. That’s the age I’m playing her, but I’m really 33.”
Sally Struthers finds peace with the Bunkers
Flash forward to 1974, and her feelings seemed to have changed, which might have something to do with the fact that she actually sued to get out of her contract, which is when Gloria suddenly became a more fleshed-out character.
“The show’s been on three and a half years, 85 shows, and each a new experience, because no other family show has had the courage to present so many firsts — the first to involve a rape, to discuss menstruation, to have a story on the mentally handicapped. Actually, the show’s been great for my psyche. It’s given me more confidence, enabled me to travel, to meet fascinating people and to get my first starring role, which is why I’m here. And the show itself has closed a lot of gaps — generations are speaking to each other, parents and children are laughing together at each other’s foibles, and it’s opened a lot of heads.”
‘Gloria’
By 1978, both she and Rob Reiner were ready to move on, choosing not to renew their contracts. All in the Family itself would end in 1979, but be reborn as Archie Bunker’s Place that fall, which ran until 1983. The year before its conclusion, Struthers signed on board for the spin-off show, Gloria, which only had a single-season run from 1982 to 1983. In that show, Mike Stivic has left Gloria for one of his students and is living in a nudist commune. Looking for a new life for herself, Gloria and her son, Joey, move from California to a fictional upstate New York town Fox Ridge. There she works as an assistant to a pair of veterinarians played by Burgess Meredith and Jo de Winter.
“I grew up as Gloria grew up,” Struthers reflected to The Akron Beacon Journal in 1982. “As Sally Struthers went through changes physically and emotionally, so did Gloria — my hair getting long, my getting wiser. I had, after eight seasons, played every facet of Gloria at that age. But three-and-a-half years later, she’s a completely different character than she was.”
A year later, she was pretty candid with The Columbia Record as to why she chose to step back into the part: “Coming from three-and-a-half years of unemployment, I’m tickled. If you would have asked me, as CBS did, to continue playing Gloria, I was adamant about not playing the character anymore. I was going to do other things with my career and life and leave that wonderful character and incredible memories behind me, and hopefully create new characters. That didn’t work out.
“In the meantime, I took some time off and created a little character named Samantha. I think having a baby was about the best thing I’ve ever done. However, when I wanted to go back to work, the work wasn’t there. [But] I returned to the character because she is so different from where we left her. Now, she is taking care of herself for the first time in her life. She was always taken care of by mom and dad and got married right out of high school. Michael then took care of her. Now, not only is she taking care of herself, but another little character, Joey.”
‘The Odd Couple’
From 1985 to 1986, Struthers was on Broadway as Florence Unger opposite Rita Moreno’s Olive Madison in Neil Simon’s female version of The Odd Couple. Her reason for doing so was simply that it was work.
“I wanted to do The Odd Couple because it was the first work that had been offered to me in a year and a half,” the actress explained. “And I needed and wanted to work so desperately as an artist and as a homeowner with financial responsibilities, that when it was offered to me, I jumped at the chance, even though it was an offer that came with a lot of setbacks for me emotionally. Going on the road was not something I was looking forward to doing; being separated from my family and my friends.”
Given her background with All in the Family, she mused, “It’s the strangest phenomenon to be at the top of the. mountain and the next day to be at the bottom, but somehow you didn’t feel the fall.”
Sally Struthers’ additional roles
She had a recurring role on the TV version of 9 to 5 from 1986 to 1988, appeared in 52 episodes of Gilmore Girls as Babette Dell and continued to make appearances on other shows. In recent years she was a part of a number of stage productions, including the 50th anniversary tour of Hello, Dolly! (2013 to 2014) and Young Frankenstein (2022). Her most recent film roles were Still Waiting in the Wings (2016) and You & Me (2017). This year she’s on the Ted Danson television series Man on the Inside.
Outside of acting, Struthers spent many years working as a spokesperson for the Christian Children’s Fund (later ChildFund), bringing attention to the plight of impoverished children in developing countries. As she told The Roanoke Times in 1979, “You don’t get the opportunity to find out about people’s love and care of other people unless you yourself get involved. My grandmother used to sponsor children for CCF. If you see someone you love taking care of people outside your immediate family, it gives you a broad perspective of other people in the world needing help.”
In her private life, she was married to psychiatrist William C. Rader from 1977 to 1983 and is the mother of 1. Sally Struthers is 77.
