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Larry Linville, who played the whining surgeon Maj. Frank
Burns on the hit television comedy M*A*S*H, died late Monday at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the hospital said early Tuesday. He was 60 years
old. Linville, who had a cancerous lung removed two years ago, was readmitted to
the hospital Sunday suffering from complications from pneumonia, according to
CBS radio news. Burns was best known for the sniveling major who carries on an
extramarital affair with head nurse Margaret ``Hot Lips'' Houlihan, played by
Loretta Swit, in the comedy about a field hospital unit in Korea during the
early-1950s war. ``My scenes with Loretta were quite extraordinary because we
were a team,'' he said in a taped interview aired on CBS radio. ''We were Mutt
and Jeff, Roadrunner and Coyote, whatever, we were a proper pair.'' He was the
foil of the show's stars, Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers, the hospital unit's best
doctors who used gallows humor, practical jokes and sexual hijinks to heap fun
on their hapless colleague, and to retain their sanity while working close to
the front lines. Linville was an original member for the first five years of the
long-running series, which aired on CBS-TV from 1972 to 1983, or nearly four
times the duration of the war it depicted. A spokeswoman at Sloan-Kettering
could not provide additional information. Reuters/Variety |
Here is Larry Linville's obituary from Reuters: NEW YORK (Reuters)-