Judy Farrell, who played Nurse Able M*A*S*H opposite her then-husband Mike Farrell and later served as a writer for the ABC soap opera Port Karel, has passed away. She turned 84.
Farrell died Sunday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center from complications of a recent stroke, her son, Michael, said The Hollywood Reporter.
Farrell also appeared on other shows such as Judd for the defense, Get smart, Medical Center, Quincy M, Emergency!, Room 222, The partridge family, Benson And Famefor which she also wrote an episode.
From 1976-83, the Oklahoma native appeared on eight episodes of M*A*S*H. Her first was 1976’s “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” in which Hawkeye (Alan Alda) tries to fix a gas stove in the nurse’s tent and it explodes, temporarily blinding him.
“Alan decided to make it so he really couldn’t see it,” she said THR in 2018 in an oral history of the CBS series. “Eventually I became the nurse who showed him around, except I was always bumping him into things because I didn’t know how to show a blind person around. At one point Alan turned to me and said, ‘Do your children trust you?’”
Farrell also appeared in the series finale, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”, which drew over 105 million viewers in the US on February 28, 1983.
Including her resume on the big screen J. W. Coop (1971), Neil Simons Chapter two (1979) and Long term relationship (2006), and she wrote for the General Hospital spinoff Port Karel from 1998-2003.
Then known as Judy Hayden, she met Mike Farrell in a musical-comedy class at UCLA, and they were married from 1963 until their divorce in 1983. (He joined M*A*S*H at the beginning of the fourth season in 1975 as Captain BJ Hunnicutt and married actress Shelley Fabares in 1984.)
Survivors include her second husband, Joe Bratcher (they married in 1985), and her children, Michael and Erin.
