After seven years of starring as the cruise director on the ship that promised love, this actor was shown a lot of hate when she was tossed overboard for her very public battle with cocaine.
After sinking her career and personal life, the now 70-year-old star went from being TV’s most beloved ship steward to a cheese steward for a Seattle-based catering company.
Keep reading to learn the identity of this actor!
When The Love Boat first set sail in 1977, the TV series fulfilled its promise of being “something for everyone.”
Every week, fans tuned in to watch the adventures of their favorite crew on the Pacific Princess, including Captain Stubing and his daughter Vicki (Gavin McLeod and Jill Whelan), Doc (Bernie Kopell), Gopher (Fred Grandy), bartender Isaac (Ted Lange) and the cruise director, Cynthia Lauren Tewes, who was 23 when she started her role as Julie McCoy.
In season eight of the hit TV series, the Golden Globe nominated Tewes, who won the role over 100 other candidates, was notably absent from the ship. The star was replaced by Patricia Klous, who played her on-screen sister and new cruise director, Judy McCoy.
Speaking with TV Guide in 1985, executive producer Douglas Cramer explained why Tewes was fired: “There were severe problems with Lauren. Not just recently, but for all of the seven years she was with The Love Boat… It was terribly disrupting.”
Tewes was fired from the show in 1984 for her addiction with cocaine.
“All that money didn’t go into a bank. It went into my nose,” Tewes said in the same interview. “I wanted to be one of the gang. I am ashamed to say it, but it’s true. The first time I took cocaine I had just gotten the job on The Love Boat and I was on my way to a party. My date said, ‘Let’s do drugs.’ And I said, ‘What the heck?’
“The feeling it gave me was incredible euphoria. You think you are fine. You think you are stronger, braver. I thought it gave me the courage I missed. It was like going to Oz and asking for courage. But instead, I got cocaine.”
In 2014, Tewes shared with Oprah Winfrey her struggles with cocaine addiction.
”I felt guilty, I felt shamed and humiliation and disgusted and disappointment, I knew that I had gotten myself into a situation I couldn’t get out of by myself,” she said. “I secretly begged and begged and begged for someone to help me. For me it was an issue with cocaine in the 1970’s and early 1980’s when it was a popular drug but if you ask anybody, I was the only one doing it in all of Hollywood. It was just me and nobody wanted to help me.”
Working through her addiction alone, the actor of the 1981 film Eyes of a Stranger started withdrawal in 1980, but it took her a few years to become sober.
“It just sunk in that I was not having a good time, that I was killing myself and that I was spending all my money. So, I stopped completely,” she says in the interview with TV Guide.
Family tragedy
After she sobered up, Tewes focused her career on theatre, which gave her a new platform to showcase her talents as an actor and director.
In this time, she divorced twice and then met Robert Nadir in 1993 while performing in an Arizona Theater Company play. The two dated long-distance for a year before Tewes joined him in Seattle.
“I decided to change my whole life, which has been a wonderful thing for me,” she said in 1998. “The theater community here has been very responsive to me.”
The two married in 1996, but in 2002, Robert was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). He died the same year at age 46. It wasn’t the first time Lauren had gone through a family tragedy. In 1987, she lost her 1-month-old daughter, who passed after being born prematurely.
‘Victim of circumstance’
Her career never fully recovered, but she did have small appearances on TV shows like Who’s the Boss?, The Fugitive and Twin Peaks. Tewes also reunited with the original cast on an episode of The Love Boat: The Next Wave, which sees her character in a relationship with Doc.
However, she was not aboard the Princess Cruises’ latest Love Boat at Sea Celebration, a seven-night themed cruise that featured some original cast members from the TV show including Kopell, Lange, Whelan and Grandy, a congressman from 1987 to 1995. McLeod died in 2021 at age 90.
Though Tewes wasn’t present, she wasn’t forgotten by her former co-workers.
People reports that Whelan, now 57, said she frequently sees her old castmate, who will fly out to visit for a weekend, spending time “cooking and just laughing and sharing stories all the time.”
“We should talk about our pal, who is a sister to all of us,” says the former child star. “She’s just a very genuine, sweet human being, and by the way, a spectacular actress. I mean, I even look back at The Love Boat episodes and I just marvel at her and her ability to move so effortlessly between doing a dramatic scene and comedy. But she is one of our favorite people and we adore her.”
Meanwhile Grandy touched on her dismissal from the show, saying she “has recovered magnificently” and that the “the circumstances of her departure were not so lovely.”
“This would’ve been the early ’80s, substance abuse on a set in those days was a punishable offense,” Grandy, 76, said. “It was not a healthcare problem, and it was not understood in the way it is understood now. And to some degree, she was a victim of circumstance at the time because the attention and care and therapy she should have gotten was meted out in the form of discipline.”
Today she can be heard on Murder and the Murdochs, a comedy-mystery radio series that’s hosted by Imagination Theatre.
And, when she’s not busy acting, the now 70-year-old culinary artists spends her time sharpening her skills as a cheese specialist with a Seattle-based catering company.
“I hope and pray that that’s all past now,” Tewes tells the Los Angeles Times. “I think I made the right choices by trying to stay in the business while it was trying to keep me out, by following my own heart and my own drive, and by making the choice to stick it through.”
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