After seven years as the cruise director on the ship that promised love, this actor was thrown overboard for her very public ᴅʀᴜɢ problem.
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.
Continue reading to discover the identity of this actor!
When The Love Boat premiered in 1977, it lived up to its promise of offering “something for everyone.”
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.
Tewes, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for the part over 100 other nominees, was noticeably absent from the hit TV series’ eighth season. 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 severe problems with Lauren. Not just recently, but for all of the seven years she was with The Love Boat… It was terribly disrupting.”
Tewes was sacked from the show in 1984 because she was ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛᴇᴅ to cocaine.
“All that money didn’t go into a bank. It went into my nose,” Tewes said in the same interview. “I wanted to be one of the gang. I am ashamed to say it, but it’s true. The first time I took cocaine I had just gotten the job on The Love Boat and I was on my way to a party. My date said, ‘Let’s do drugs.’ And I said, ‘What the heck?’
“The feeling it gave me was incredible euphoria. You think you are fine. You think you are stronger, braver. I thought it gave me the courage I missed. It was like going to Oz and asking for courage. But instead, I got cocaine.”
Tewes opened up about her cocaine ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ to Oprah Winfrey in 2014.
”I felt guilty, I felt shamed and humiliation and disgusted and disappointment, I knew that I had gotten myself into a situation I couldn’t get out of by myself,” she said. “I secretly begged and begged and begged for someone to help me. For me it was an issue with cocaine in the 1970’s and early 1980’s when it was a popular ᴅʀᴜɢ but if you ask anybody, I was the only one doing it in all of Hollywood. It was just me and nobody wanted to help me.”
Working through her ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ 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 just sunk in that I was not having a good time, that I was killing myself and that I was spending all my money. So, I stopped completely,” she says in the interview with TV Guide.
Family tragedy
After sobering up, Tewes shifted her concentration to theatre, which provided her with a fresh platform to demonstrate her acting and directing abilities.
During this time, 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 said in 1998. “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 ᴅɪsᴇᴀsᴇ (ALS). He ᴅɪᴇᴅ 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 ᴅɪᴇᴅ due to early birth.
‘Victim of circumstance’
Her career never entirely rebounded, but she did make brief appearances on television shows 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 ᴅɪᴇᴅ in 2021, aged 90.
Tewes was not present, but she was not forgotten by her former coworkers.
According to People, Whelan, now 57, visits her old castmate frequently 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 a sister to all of us,” says the former child star. “She’s just a very genuine, sweet human being, and by the way, a spectacular actress. I mean, I even look back at The Love Boat episodes and I just marvel at her and her ability to move so effortlessly between doing a dramatic scene and comedy. But she is one of our favorite people and we adore her.”
Meanwhile, Grandy addressed her expulsion from the show, 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, 76, said. “It was not a healthcare problem, and it was not understood in the way it is understood now. And to some degree, she was a victim of circumstance at the time because the attention and care and therapy she should have gotten was meted out in the form of discipline.”
Today, she can be heard on Murder and the Murdochs, Imagination Theatre’s comedy-mystery radio series.
When she’s not acting, 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’s all past now,” Tewes tells the Los Angeles Times. “I think I made the right choices by trying to stay in the business while it was trying to keep me out, by following my own heart and my own drive, and by making the choice to stick it through.”
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