What Happened to Olivia Walton? This Is Why She Isn't in the Last Season

What happened to Olivia Walton? 'The Waltons' matriarch didn't appear in the show's last season, and actress Michael Learned explained why.

One of the biggest TV displays of the ‘70s used to be The Waltons, a family drama set in rural Virginia all the way through the Great Depression and World War II. 

For seven-and-a-half seasons, actress Michael Learned starred as matriarch Olivia Walton, the fashion of a really perfect father or mother. So when it was announced that she would be leaving the collection midway via Season 8, fanatics (and producers) have been crushed. It’s a choice that the now 81-year-old still regrets.

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What happened to Olivia Walton?

The personality’s final appearance on the display used to be in the Season 8 episode "The Waiting," which aired on Nov. 22, 1979. 

Initially, the mom of 7 moves to Washington D.C. to be together with her eldest son John-Boy, who's injured whilst reporting on the warfare in Europe. But later in the series, it’s revealed that Olivia is being treated for tuberculosis at a health facility in Arizona. 

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Michael went on to co-star in 4 of the six reunion films — confirming that Olivia does continue to exist her illness — but the Emmy winner was once MIA for all of Season 9. What made her surrender the drama 18 months shy of the finale? Exhaustion. 

"On a television thing it's so minute, the moments are so minute. It's stop and start, stop and start," Michael defined in an interview shortly after her exit. "In a scene where there's any real emotion, it's very hard to dredge that up and then be stopped and then wait for half an hour and then dredge it up again." 

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During a 2017 chat with Fox News, she added, "I just couldn’t do it anymore… I felt a lot of the times I was sitting around for 14 hours saying, 'More coffee, John?' The fact is I was bored. And I thought I had enough money, which wasn’t true."

Following her departure, the cast filmed just 36 extra episodes. "There’s been times when I’ve regretted [leaving the series] only in that it probably would have been better to complete the whole show," Michael admitted. 

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Though she left on her own phrases, the actress still found it tricky to say good-bye. "I was crying on and off camera," she recalled to The Washington Post. 

"I finally got worried — I checked with the director. I said, 'You know, she's only going to a sanatorium. Maybe what we're playing is Michael Learned leaving The Waltons rather than Olivia.'"

Michael Learned confessed that she had no pastime in enjoying Olivia at first.

The then 33-year-old, who replaced Patricia Neal as Olivia following the 1971 TV movie The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, begrudgingly auditioned for the function. "I didn’t want to do it. But I was going through a divorce, and I had three kids to support," Michael informed Fox News. 

"I wasn’t drawn to it at all! I had finished doing 'Private Lives,' which Francis Coppola directed, and I played Cleopatra that same season at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. I wasn’t ready to play a 40-year-old farmer’s wife," she shared. "Of course in retrospect, it was a gift from God. It saved my life."

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