After seven years of shining as the cruise director on the ship that promised love, this artist faced a great deal of animosity when she was tossed overboard for her widely reported drug battle.
After damaging her career and personal life, the now 70-year-old star went from being the most beloved ship steward on television to working as a cheese steward for a catering company in Seattle.
Continue reading to find out the identity of this actor!
When the television program The Love Boat sailed for the first time in 1977, it fulfilled its promise to offer “something for everyone.”
With Doc (Bernie Kopell), Gopher (Fred Grandy), bartender Isaac (Ted Lange), Captain Stubing and his daughter Vicki (Gavin McLeod and Jill Whelan), and the cruise director Cynthia Lauren Tewes (who played Julie McCoy at the age of 23), fans looked forward to the weekly adventures of their favorite cast members on the Pacific Princess.
Throughout season eight of the popular television program, Tewes, the Golden Globe nominee who was selected for the role out of 100 applications, was noticeably absent from the ship. The celebrity was replaced by Patricia Klous, who played Judy McCoy, the new cruise director and her on-screen sister.
In a 1985 interview with TV Guide, executive producer Douglas Cramer explained Tewes’ dismissal by saying, “There were severe problems with Lauren.” Not only today, but over the course of her seven years on The Love Boat. It was very distressing.
Tewes was fired from the show in 1984 because of her cocaine addiction.
None of that money went to a bank. “It went into my nose,” Tewes said in the same interview. “I wished I could join the gang. Although it is painful to acknowledge, this is the reality. The first time I did cocaine, I was on my way to a party; I had just begun work on The Love Boat. My date proposed that we use drugs together. Then I cried out, “What the hell?”
I was utterly ecstatic after it. You think everything is fine. You think you’re stronger and bolder. I felt as though it gave me the courage I had been lacking. It was akin to requesting courage at the Wizard of Oz. Instead, though, I got cocaine.
In 2014, Tewes confided in Oprah Winfrey about her struggles with cocaine addiction.
“I felt guilty, ashamed, humiliated, disgusted, and disappointed because I knew that I had put myself in a situation that I couldn’t get out of on my own,” she continued. I begged everyone to help me in secret. I had an issue with cocaine when it was a popular drug in the 1970s and early 1980s, but if you ask anyone in Hollywood, they’ll tell you that I was the only one doing it. No one wanted to help me, and I was on my own.
Eyes of a Stranger, the 1981 film actress, overcome her addiction on her own. Although she started going through withdrawal in 1980, it took her a number of years to get clean.
All of a sudden, I realized that I was wasting all of my money, killing myself, and not enjoying myself. So I quit up completely,” she says in the interview with TV Guide.
Family misfortune
After sobering up, Tewes focused on theater, which gave her a new platform to showcase her acting and directing abilities.
During this time, she experienced two divorces and met Robert Nadir in 1993 while performing in a play with the Arizona Theater Company. The two enjoyed a year-long long-distance relationship prior to Tewes relocating to Seattle.
“I made the decision to change my entire life in 1998, and it has been a wonderful thing for me,” she said. “I’ve gotten a great response from the local theater community.”
The two got married in 1996, despite Robert’s 2002 diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). In the same year, he died at age 46. Lauren has never before gone through a family tragedy. In 1987, her premature baby died at the age of one month.
“Situation victim”
She never fully recovered, but she did appear in a few TV shows, such as Who’s the Boss?, The Fugitive, and Twin Peaks. Tewes also returned with the original cast in an episode of The Love Boat: The Next Wave when her character is dating Doc.
However, she was not on Princess Cruises’ most recent Love Boat at Sea Celebration, a seven-night themed cruise that featured Kopell, Lange, Whelan, and Grandy, a congressman from 1987 to 1995, among other original cast members from the television show. McLeod died in 2021 at the age of 90.
Despite her absence, Tewes’s previous coworkers remembered her.
According to People, Whelan, 57, stated that she and her former castmate, who will be visiting for a weekend, spend a lot of 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,” the former child actor says. In addition to being a fantastic actress, she is a truly good and honest person. Her ability to switch between funny and dramatic parts so effortlessly still astounds me when I watch old episodes of The Love Boat. She is one of our favorite people, though, and we adore her.
She “has recovered magnificently” and “the circumstances of her departure were not so lovely,” Grandy said in response to her dismissal from the program.
“This would have been in the early ’80s; substance abuse on a set was a punishable offense in those days,” said Grandy, 76. It wasn’t a medical problem, and that wasn’t how it was understood at the time. Because discipline was employed in lieu of the appropriate care, attention, and rehabilitation, she was also partially a victim of the situation at the time.
She currently appears on Murder and the Murdochs, Imagination Theatre’s comedy-mystery radio series.
In her free time, the now 70-year-old culinary prodigy honed her skills as a cheese specialist for a Seattle catering company.
Tewes says, “I hope and pray that’s all past now,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “I think I made the right choices by following my instincts and staying motivated, by trying to stay in the industry when it was trying to push me out, and by choosing to stick with it through the tough times.”
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