Sally Struthers shocks fans, admitting she would “physically sink in my chair” over the pressures behind All in the Family.NN
He brought her into the family.
Sally Struthers took away a key piece of advice from her former “All in the Family” co-star Rob Reiner — which she’s held onto for more than 40 years.
“Rob Reiner saw me deflate one time at the Monday morning read through around the table,” Struthers, 78, exclusively told The Post, while promoting the 25th anniversary of “Gilmore Girls.”
“Every Monday morning, we would gather in the rehearsal space. It would be our director, the actors on the show, and then it would be Norman Lear, and it would be the writers. And we would read [an episode script] out loud,” Struthers explained.
A “script girl” would time it, and tell them if each script was “two minutes too long.”
On instances when they had to look for two minutes to cut, “Rob Reiner would jump right in … we started to call him ‘The Sultan of Slice’ because he knew immediately what line to cut without affecting a joke or the plot,” Struthers said.
She recalled that they could “hardly keep up with” Reiner’s razor sharp instincts.
“He’d say, now go to page five. That line at the bottom. Gloria’s line.”
Struthers’ first major role was in “All in the Family,” which aired on CBS from 1971 to 1979.
Produced by Lear and Bud Yorkin, the seminal sitcom was about working-class Queens patriarch Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), his wife Edith (Jean Stappleton), their daughter, Gloria (Struthers), and Gloria’s husband, Michael Stivic (Reiner).
Struthers said the trouble arose when, “Maybe I only had seven lines in that whole episode. The writers were older men, and they didn’t know how to write for Gloria. And so, there wasn’t a lot for her to say. My lines every week were akin to, ‘I’ll help you set the table, Mom’ and ‘Oh, Daddy! Stop it!’ ”
She explained that when Gloria only had a handful of lines per episode, she tried her best to hold “on to those three lines.”
“If one of my three lines went [and got cut], I would physically sink in my chair,” she told The Post. “Because I was spending a lot of time at CBS in Los Angeles, rehearsing with everyone, and I always have the least to say as my character.”
Things came to a head when the “When Harry Met Sally” director took her aside one day.
“Rob said, ‘I know that we’re the same age, and I have no business instructing you. But, I see how disappointing it is for you when you lose a line or two, and nobody writes for you the delicious arguments like I get to do with Archie. If you could change your mindset, Sally, if you could make the show more important than your part, then you would not only be fine if a line or two of yours was cut, but you might even offer up yourself, knowing that’s not an important line and it could go. I hope you can do that.’”
From then on, Struthers “made each episode more important” than her “silly part.”
“And I wasn’t disappointed anymore,” she told The Post.
Struthers ultimately won two Emmys for the role.
“[Reiner] taught me all about mindset,” she said. “And that was a huge teaching moment for me.”
