From Little Girl to Icon: How Sally Struthers Became Archie Bunker’s Beloved Daughter on All in the Family!

All in the family 0

A struggling actress at the time, playing Gloria Stivic on ‘All in the Family’ made her a star

All in the Family may have made its debut more than 50 years ago, but the impact of the show was transformative on TV and still being felt today. It brought Archie and Edith Bunker (Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton), along with their daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) and son-in-law Mike Stivic (Rob Reiner) to life in such a way that they became some of the most real characters ever presented on a television sitcom.

For Sally Struthers, who was born on July 28, 1947 in Portland, Oregon, it was an opportunity for steady work and, just as importantly, for the world to get to know her as a performer. But her journey there was not an easy one, as you’ll discover in the facts about the actress — who won two Emmy Awards for her portrayal — below.“Sally Struthers of Portland, Oregon, didn’t have what you’d call a picture book childhood,” offered The Orlando Sentinel in August 1971. “When she was in the third grade, her parents separated, they didn’t get a divorce until she was 17. That’s when her father, a doctor, married his nurse. She loved her father, but he didn’t come around very often. So she would make believe she was sick, so he would come over as family doctor. She thinks part of her acting skill dates from that period, when she got to be pretty good at feigning illness.”Filling in more of her background was a 1971 edition of The Windsor Star, which wrote, “When Sally Struthers was a youngster, she was determined to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a doctor. As she reached her late teens, she realized that she wasn’t the type for cutting and poking humans, so she began to take every art class available at her Portland, Oregon high school. She decided to become a commercial artist. Sally won an art scholarship for college, but once again she still wasn’t sure about making art her life’s work.”

It was at that point that she decided to apply to the famed Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts and was accepted, being awarded a scholarship that kept her in attendance for two years. “There,” stated The Oregon Daily Journal in 1971, “she played everything from a 10-year-old child to a 90-year-old woman. ‘The training was very valuable, especially when you read for a part. The course was still tough, but we learned makeup, fencing, dancing, dialects, play read, set design … everything.’”

“After the playhouse and before the breaks started coming her way,” added the newspaper, “Sally spent three years going through what most hopefuls face. She tried out for every part that came along, made some commercials and supported herself as a waitress, clerk, telephone solicitor, receptionist and even sold popcorn and candy in a theater and cleaned the restrooms after hours.”

Bad Luck Sally

Things weren’t exactly going smoothly for her. In 1968 she made two films that went unreleased. These were followed by a commercial in which her naturally curly blonde hair was turned into straight brown hair — and then the sponsor elected not to use the commercial.

She nonetheless signed with a couple of agencies to be cast in commercials, and she was: first as a talking lemon followed by her role as a dancing hamburger.

“Then,” The Oregon Daily Journal described, “she auditioned for The Jonathan Winters Show, got the part of the ‘story lady’ and the show was canceled before she got to film a sequence. For six months she survived on the residuals from her early commercial work. And for a while sang with the Spike Jones Jr. Band.”

Things got even worse when her father died and she flew home for the funeral in Portland. When she made the return trip to Los Angeles, she discovered that a commercial job wasn’t happening, the Spike Jones Jr. Band had broken up and she was broke.

And it just might have been a good thing, since she found herself cast in a small role in the Jack Nicholson film Five Easy Pieces. “I’m very proud to be in it, although I’m only on the screen for five minutes at the most, people remember,” she said.

Summer and fall TV roles

Thanks to Five Easy Pieces she found herself signed with Creative Management Associates (CMA), and within two months she booked work on the summer Smothers Brothers Show and the fall Tim Conway Hour, finding herself in a position that was quite different than she was used to.“All of a sudden, after three years of wandering around Hollywood,” she said, “I had so many offers coming in that I couldn’t keep up.” Unfortunately, the gigs didn’t last. Neither did the shows.From 1971 to 1972,  Struthers provided her voice to the character of Pebbles Flintstone on The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, a Saturday morning cartoon that was a spin-off of The Flintstones. The series had Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Rubble (voiced by former Dennis the Menace star Jay North) as teenage versions of the babies introduced on the original series. As such, they dealt with high school in Bedrock and found themselves in comic misadventures, trying to start a band and so on. Also, Pebbles offered her own twist on her dad’s catchphrase, changing it to, “Yabba-dabba-doozy!” The actress actually left the show during its run when a pilot she filmed was given the green light to go to series. Its name? All in the Family.

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