After serving as the cruise director on the ship that promised love for seven years, her public drug problem forced her to step down.
After wrecking her career and personal life, the now-70-year-old actress went from being TV’s most popular ship steward to a cheese steward for a Seattle-based catering firm.
Every week, fans tuned in to follow the adventures of their favorite crew members 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 began her role as Julie McCoy.
The successful TV series’ eighth season noticeably lacked Tewes, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her role among over 100 other nominees. Patricia Klous, who played her on-screen sister and new cruise director Judy McCoy, took over for the actress.
In an interview with TV Guide in 1985, executive producer Douglas Cramer stated why Tewes was fired: “There were major difficulties with Lauren. She has been on The Love Boat for seven years. ” It was extremely disruptive.”
Tewes was sacked from the show in 1984 because she was addicted to c0caine.
“All that money did not go into a bank. “It got into my nose,” Tewes added in the same interview. “I wanted to be a member of the gang. I am sorry to admit that, but it is true. I had just started working on The Love Boat and was on my way to a party when I took cocaine for the first time. My date said, ‘Let’s do drugs. “What the hell?” was my response.
“I had great euphoria. You believe you’re alright. You believe you’re stronger and bolder. I believed it gave me the bravery I lacked. It was akin to going to Oz and begging for bravery. But instead, I received cocaine.
Tewes opened up about her cocaine addiction to Oprah Winfrey in 2014.
“I felt guilty, I felt shame and humiliation and disgust and disappointment; I knew that I had gotten myself into a situation I couldn’t get out of by myself,” she told me. “I silently begged and pleaded for someone to assist me. For me, cocaine was a problem in the 1970s and early 1980s when it was a fashionable substance, but if you asked anyone, I was the only one using it in all of Hollywood. It was just me, and no one wanted to assist.”
Working through her addiction alone, the actor from the 1981 film Eyes of a Stranger began withdrawal in 1980, but it took her several years to become sober.
“It finally dawned on me that I wasn’t having fun, that I was killing myself, and that I was wasting all of my money. “So I stopped completely,” she admits in an interview with TV Guide.
Family tragedy
After sobering up, Tewes shifted her concentration to theater, which provided her with a fresh platform to demonstrate her acting and directing abilities.
During this period, she divorced twice and met Robert Nadir in 1993 while appearing in an Arizona Theater Company production. After a year of long-distance dating, Tewes moved to Seattle to join him.
“I decided to change my whole life, which has been a wonderful thing for me,” she stated at the time. “The theater community here has been very responsive to me.”
The couple married in 1996, but in 2002, Robert was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). He died in the same year, at the age of 46. Lauren had been through a family catastrophe before. In 1987, she lost her 1-month-old daughter, who died due to early birth.
‘Victim of circumstance.’
Her career never entirely rebounded, but she did make cameos on television programs such as Who’s the Boss?, The Fugitive, and Twin Peaks. Tewes also reconnected with the original cast for an episode of The Love Boat: The Next Wave, in which her character is in a relationship with Doc.
However, she was not on Princess Cruises’ current Love Boat at Sea Celebration, a seven-night themed trip that included some original cast members from the TV program, including Kopell, Lange, Whelan, and Grandy, a congressman from 1987 to 1995. McLeod died in 2021, aged 90.
Although Tewes was not present, her old coworkers did not forget her.
According to People, Whelan, now 57, visits her old castmate often and 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 like a sister to all of us,” adds the former child star. “She’s simply a very sincere, nice person, and by the way, a fantastic actor. I mean, I look back at The Love Boat episodes and marvel at her ability to seamlessly transition from emotional and comedic scenes. But she is one of our favorites, and we adore her.”
Meanwhile, Grandy addressed her expulsion from the program, stating that she “has recovered magnificently” and that “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, who is 76 years old, explained. “It was not a healthcare issue, and it was not comprehended in the same way that it is now. And, to some extent, she was a victim of circumstance at the time, since the attention, care, and therapy she deserved was delivered in the guise of discipline.”
Today, she may be heard on Murder and the Murdochs, Imagination Theatre’s comedy-mystery radio series.
When she’s not performing, the now-70-year-old culinary artist hones her abilities as a cheese specialist for a Seattle-based catering firm.
“I hope and pray that that is all over now,” Tewes told the Los Angeles Times. “I believe I made the right decisions by persisting in the business despite its attempts to exclude me, by adhering to my own passion and perseverance.”
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