All In The Family star Sally Struthers says she feuded with creator and spent $40K on bid to leave show

All In The Family actress Sally Struthers says she fell out with show creator Norman Lear, stating she was ‘not a big fan of him’.

Lear died in 2023 at the age of 101, after decades of being hailed as a TV legend who deftly wove political issues into a comedic situation.

All In The Family starred Carroll O’Connor as the vulgar patriarch Archie Bunker, whose right-wing stance was used by the writers to poke fun at conservatism.

Struthers, 77, plays Archie’s daughter Gloria, who clashes politically with her father and leans toward her liberal husband Michael, played by Rob Reiner.

Now Struthers has claimed that she had a rocky relationship with Lear off-screen, even spending $40,000 on a failed legal bid to leave his show after season five.

She also claimed that Lear once told her that he only cast her because she had “blue eyes and a fat face” on the podcast. Let’s talk about that!.

During Struthers’ new interview, Lear was mentioned as the creator of All In The Family, and she immediately took issue with the characterization.

According to Struthers’ version of events, Carroll O’Connor first came up with the idea of ​​making an American adaptation of the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, on which All In The Family was based.

She said O’Connor and a “full-fledged writer friend of his” collaborated on “scripts” for an American version of Till Death Do Us Part, “but they didn’t have the producer power and money to make it happen, so After fooling around with it for a while, it ended up in Norman’s hands, and Norman pretended to have made it for 52 years.”

All In The Family enjoyed a successful eight-season run on CBS from 1971 to 1979, but Struthers claims that during this period she was excluded from cast dinners held at the home of Lear and his then-wife, feminist activist Frances Loeb. .

Struthers said that during the show, Lear and Loeb would “have dinner parties, and they would invite Carroll O’Connor and his wife Nancy. They were going to invite Jean Stapleton, who played Edith Bunker, and her husband Bill.”

Rob Reiner, who played Struthers’ TV husband, is also said to have been asked to the dinners along with his then-wife Penny Marshall.

Struthers claimed that Reiner was invited “because Rob was the son of Carl Reiner, who was a good friend of Norman Lear.”

Meanwhile, she claimed: “I hadn’t been invited to his house in eight years,” and as the podcast hosts expressed their condolences, she added: “It didn’t feel right.”

By the latter part of season one, All In The Family had proven itself to be a ratings triumph, and Struthers excitedly came up to Lear during a break to talk to him about it.

She noted that he had auditioned “so many young ladies” for the role of Gloria, and that the final four included Penny Marshall.

Struthers confessed that she “didn’t even try” during her final audition because she assumed Marshall was a shoo-in since her real-life husband Reiner had already been cast as Gloria’s fictional husband.

After making the confession, she asked Lear if she had really been “the funniest” when the actresses did improvisations for their auditions.

“And he said, ‘No,'” Struthers recalled, adding, “So I said, ‘Okay, well, wow, then why did I get it?’ Why am I here now?

According to Struthers, Lear responded that he and the writers decided the show would last longer if Struthers’ character Gloria was a “daddy’s girl.”

Lear and his fellow writers thought that Archie Bunker would be “a lot to swallow for the American public, with his bigotry and his social vilification,” and so they wanted to “soften” him by giving him a “soft place in his heart.” give’. for his daughter.’

She then claimed that Lear told her, “So we hired you because, like Carroll O’Connor, you have blue eyes and a fat face.”

Struthers felt like she had been relegated to the position of a “fourth banana” on the show that the writers were unsure how to use.

She explained that her “frustration in the first five seasons” was that “our older, brilliant, Jewish faith writers, who knew how to write for Milton Berle and Carl Reiner and Carroll O’Connor, didn’t know what to do.” with a young lady.’

According to Struthers, she was left with “about three lines per show that said, ‘I’ll help you set the table, Ma!’ “Michiel, where are you going?” and, “Oh, Dad, stop it!” And the next week I had the same three lines, but in a different order.”

She claimed she was so fed up that after five years she “hired a lawyer and tried to leave the show,” took the case to arbitration and spent $40,000 in legal fees in a failed attempt to “break my contract.”

Struthers shared, “I lost and went back and had three more seasons, but they were by far the most fun for me,” as the writers “created a lot for me to do on the show.”

Ultimately, Struthers won two Emmy awards for the show, one in 1972 during the show’s early years and again in 1979 after her attempt to break her contract.

She got her own spin-off of the show, Gloria, which ran for one season on CBS and follows her character’s life after her husband leaves her for a younger woman.

More recently, she had a recurring role on Gilmore Girls and guested on beloved shows ranging from Murder, She Wrote to American Dad.

Since last year, she has had a recurring role on the sitcom A Man On The Inside, starring Ted Danson as a retired professor who becomes a private investigator.