She took an acting class at Los Angeles City College and appeared in a stage production of 'Look Back in Anger' with classmate Jack Nicholson and several other future stars. She opted to pursue acting and didn't put out any music until 1972, when she released the album 'Roll With the Feeling.' She would sing on the side, and sometimes in roles, throughout her career, releasing her last album, 'Sally,' in 2007. Her initial interest was in jazz singing, and she was signed to a contract with Verve records at age 18. Sally Clare Kellerman was born in 1937 in Long Beach, California, the daughter of a piano teacher and an oil executive, moving to Los Angeles as a child and attending Hollywood High School.
The movie would be turned into a TV series that lasted 11 seasons, with Loretta Swit in Kellerman's role. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, but her best supporting actress was its only acting nod despite a cast that included Duvall, Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould. 'For the first time in my life I took chances, I didn't suck in my cheeks, or worry about anything.' 'It was a very freeing, positive experience,' she told Dick Cavett in a 1970 TV interview. Kellerman said Altman brought out the best in her. She carries on a torrid affair with the equally uptight Major Frank Burns, played by Robert Duvall, demanding that he kiss her 'hot lips' in a moment secretly broadcast over the camp's public address speakers, earning her the nickname.
'This isn't a hospital, this is an insane asylum!' she screams at her commanding officer. In the film's key scene, and its peak moment of misogyny, a tent where Houlihan is showering is pulled open and she is exposed to an audience of cheering men. But she would always be best known for playing Major Houlihan, a straitlaced, by-the-book Army nurse who is tormented by rowdy doctors during the Korean War in the army comedy 'MASH.'