- Michael Learned explained in a new interview that she’s never regretted leaving The Waltons after season 8, but still wonders if she should have signed on for the series at all
- The show ran from 1972 to 1981 and earned Learned three Emmys
- Learned also remembered her close bonds with the cast, including Richard Thomas and Ralph Waite
Michael Learned won three Emmys for her role as Olivia Walton on The Waltons, but looking back, her feelings about the show are complicated.
Learned, 86, opened up about her time on the show on the Monday, Sept. 8 episode of the Still Here Hollywood Podcast with Steve Kmetko. She remembered that when her agent called her to let her know she’d gotten the part, he said, “You are now the mother of America.”
Learned said she had just played Cleopatra on stage and starred in a production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Learned said her role as Olivia was written as “a woman in her 40s,” and she was just 32, but she said, “I auditioned because we do what we have to do as actors.” When she was cast, she said, “I was beside myself because I really needed the job.”
Because she’d been doing theater so long, Learned didn’t know “where to go or what to do” on set, but the younger cast was “very professional” and “very gracious.” Ralph Waite, who played her husband John Walton Sr., and Richard Thomas, who played John-Boy, she recalled, “went out of their way to kind of make me feel welcome, and that was it. It was like a whole new world for me.”
The series ran from 1972 to 1981, for nine seasons, but Learned left the series after eight seasons. She told Kmetko that she remained “very close” with her castmates after leaving, calling them her “second family.” She also remembered that she and Waite, who died in 2014, “got sober” at the same time when he asked her to go to Alcoholics Anonymous with him.
“We both got sober and it stuck,” she remembered, noting they did “feel a bit of responsibility” to be a good “mom and dad of America.”
Kmetko said, given her close bonds, it “must have been a tough call” to decide to leave the series. He asked if she ever regretted it.
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “On the one hand, I wept because we were such a family, even the crew, we were all really close and like a family. But on the other hand, I got tired of [it].”
“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she said. She remembered that creator Earl Hamner Jr. would tell her that he wanted her in more shots. “So they’d have me ironing and going, ‘And then what happened, kids? And then where did you go? John-Boy, more coffee?’ And things, just to have me in the scene. But as an actor, it was just boring.”
Still, she said she’s “eternally grateful” for the show. “It put my kids through private school,” she said. “. . . But at the time I complained a lot, you know, ‘I want to be home with my kids,’ and here I was with these lovely kids, but they weren’t mine.”
Later in the episode, Kmetko asked if there were roles she wished she had said yes to. “I turned something down that Francis Coppola offered me,” she remembered, but otherwise, “there isn’t really.”
“I sometimes question whether I should have accepted The Waltons, but it was life-altering,” she added. “I was supposed to go on tour with Private Lives that Francis directed. Working with him was a dream.” She said she’s written him letters over the years, but “never mailed them,” because she didn’t want the director thinking she was asking for a job.
Learned isn’t precious about The Waltons or her career. When asked what she wants her legacy to be, she said, “I don’t care. I don’t need to have a legacy. I just want my kids to speak kindly of me, and they do.”
She added, “And I’m not being smarmy about it, but who’s gonna remember The Waltons 50 years from now? Nobody.”
As for the future, the octogenarian actress said, “I just want to work whenever I can.” She added that she’s still grieving the loss of her husband John Doherty, who she wed in 1991 and died in February.
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“We were together for 33 years,” she said. “I’m still quite a bit raw, actually, but having had those wonderful years with him, he was such a wonderful person, and so he made me feel cherished. And I’d never felt that before.”
“My poor mother had six girls. We were a handful for her. So I always felt like I was a pain in the ass. He made me feel special,” she said. “So I’m grateful to have had it, but I miss him terribly.”
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