Sally Struthers Blasts All in the Family's Norman Lear, Says She Spent $40K Trying to Leave the Beloved Show

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

Sally Struthers gets candid about her time on the show Everyone in the family and showrunner Norman Lear. In the episode of January 13 Let’s talk about it! With Larry Saperstein and Jacob BellottiThe 77-year-old actress spoke about working with the acclaimed producer, who died in 2023 at the age of 101.

Struthers told the podcast hosts that she’s comfortable talking about him now because “he’s gone.” She noted: “I wasn’t a big fan of his.”

“All those years on the show, Norman and his wife were having evening parties,” she said. They would often invite the show’s other stars – Carroll O’Connor, Jean Stapleton and Rob Reiner – and their spouses. Struthers revealed: “I wasn’t invited to his home for eight years. It was not good.”

From left: Norman Lear, Jean Stapleton and Sally Struthers in 1978.

CBS via Getty

Struthers also shared a disturbing conversation she had with Lear during the show’s first season, when the show first found success. “He was on the sound stage watching us practice and we were on break,” she said.

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

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

Sally Struthers says Betty White ’embarrassed’ her, calls her a ‘very passive-aggressive woman’

She remembered that Lear had said to her: “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 answer that and left.

From left: Rob Reiner, Jean Stapleton, Carroll O’Connor and Sally Struthers in ‘All in the Family’ in 1976.

CBS via Getty

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

“I usually had about three lines per show that were, ‘I’ll help you set the table, Mom,’ ‘Michael, where are you going?’ and ‘Oh, Dad, stop it’. And then the next week I would have three of the same lines in a different order. And if they literally didn’t know what to do with me in the scene, they would tell me to 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 said. She hired a lawyer, but after spending $40,000 in legal fees during the arbitration, she lost. “I came back and had three more seasons, but those were by far the most fun for me. Since Mike and Gloria finally had a baby, they made us move next door [the] Jeffersons lived,” she said.

Sally Struthers at the 2024 Emmy Awards.

Monica Schipper/WireImage

Everyone in the family ran from 1971 to 1979, with Struthers appearing in 182 episodes. She also appeared in the spinoff Archie Bunker’s Place and her own short-lived spinoff Gloria. She also rediscovered TV fans decades later with her role as Babette on Gilmore Girls.

Despite her mixed feelings about the series, Struthers said part of her longevity as an actress is that 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 postponed 2023 Emmy Awards.

Struthers still does a lot of theater work alongside her TV work on shows like The man insideand 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 also because ‘Wait a minute, is she still alive? Let’s go see how it looks now.’ ”

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Source: HIS Education