73-Year-Old Lauren Tewes Went From Waitress To ‘Love Boat’ Cruise Director, Then Traded Hollywood For A Kitchen

Love Boat star Lauren Tewes turned 73 on Monday, October 26. She was born that day in 1953 in Trafford, Pennsylvania, and by the fall of 1977 she was welcoming a new boatload of guest stars every week as Julie McCoy, the cruise director with the clipboard and the smile that never seemed to go off duty. As Closer Weekly recounted this week, she was waiting tables when the part found her.

What happened after she walked down the gangway for the last time is a quieter and braver story than most viewers ever heard. It runs through an addiction that cost her the job and a fresh start in the Pacific Northwest, and it ends somewhere none of us would have guessed back when Julie was organizing shuffleboard on the Lido Deck.

How Did a Waitress Land the Job of a Lifetime?

Tewes had been working hard for her break. Biography reports she had done more than 20 commercials in a single year and spoken one line on Charlie’s Angels before a guest spot on Starsky & Hutch caught the eye of producer Aaron Spelling. The Love Boat needed three pilots before ABC committed, Closer Weekly notes, and it was Spelling’s wife, Candy, who suggested the young actress for the third try. She beat out roughly 100 other women for Julie, according to both Biography and Wikipedia, and was hired the day before cameras rolled.

Critics were not kind when the series premiered in September 1977, but viewers climbed aboard in numbers nobody expected. “After about the third week, we thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re onto something,'” Fred Grandy, who played Gopher, told People in 2024. The show became a hit almost overnight, and the fame arrived faster than the 23-year-old at its center was ready for.

What Was Happening Off Camera?

Tewes has never hidden from that chapter. “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,” she told TV Guide in 1985, in remarks carried by UPI. “My date said, ‘Let’s do drugs.’ And I said, ‘What the heck?'” She admitted she had wanted to fit in with the cast. “I wanted to be one of the gang. I am ashamed to say it, but it’s true,” she said, and she described the drug as a false kind of bravery. “It was like going to Oz and asking for courage, but instead, I got cocaine.”

In 1984, after seven seasons, she was let go and Pat Klous came aboard as Julie’s sister, Judy McCoy. Biography says the costly habit led to too many missed days on set. Decades later her castmates see it differently than the studio did at the time. “It was not a healthcare problem, and it was not understood in the way it is understood now,” Grandy told People in 2024, adding that “to some degree, she was a victim of circumstance.” She got sober, and then she had to figure out what came next.

Why Did Julie McCoy Trade Hollywood for Seattle?

She did come back to the ship, first as a guest in a 1985 episode and then in the show’s final TV movies, according to Wikipedia and Closer Weekly. But her real second act began in 1993, when she met Seattle stage actor Bob Nadir while both were performing in an Arizona Theater Company play. She moved north to be with him in 1994. “It changed my life, to be surrounded by trees and water and caring, concerned people,” she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1998.

The stage welcomed her. She worked with the Tacoma Actors Guild, Seattle Repertory Theatre and A Contemporary Theatre, and she played Calamity Jane in Morning Glories and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. Ted Lange, her old shipmate Isaac, worked with her on Shrew and told People, “We had a ball.” As for the addiction, she had made her peace. “It’s a big part of my past,” she told the Post-Intelligencer. “It’s not any of my present.” She put on Julie’s uniform once more for Love Boat: The Next Wave in 1998 and turned up as a neighbor in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks, but by then acting was only half of her Seattle life.

What Is Love Boat Star Lauren Tewes Doing Now?

The other half happens in a kitchen. Tewes went to culinary school and trained as a cheese specialist, and when she isn’t acting she works as a sous-chef for a Seattle catering company, according to Biography and the Illawarra Mercury, whose 2015 report is cited by Wikipedia. Her old castmates know that side of her well. “She will fly to my house and we’ll spend the weekend together cooking and just laughing and sharing stories all the time,” Jill Whelan, who played Vicki Stubing, told People in 2024. You can read more about Whelan’s own voyage since the show in our look at her 60th birthday.

Tewes spoke candidly about her firing in the CW docuseries TV We Love last fall. “It was a different time,” she said, as People reported. “I was a woman, so I was blacklisted for that.” Grandy, appearing in the same series, said his one regret was that he “never really came forward and defended and supported her in a way that we should have.” Tewes had skipped Princess Cruises’ earlier Love Boat reunion sailings, but in July 2025 the line announced she would join Whelan, Grandy, Lange and Bernie Kopell for the first time aboard the Regal Princess out of Galveston that November. Whelan had already told People how she pitched it to her friend. “I told her everybody loves her so much and everybody wants to tell her how much they love her.”

The cruise director who once couldn’t find her own courage now spends her days pairing cheeses and her weekends cooking with the girl who played the captain’s daughter. She saw it coming back in 1998. “I’m much happier now than I was when I was 23,” she told the Post-Intelligencer. “I’m more self-aware, more peaceful.”