By Jonathan Hampton 
Family tragedy
After she sobered up, Tewes focused her career on theatre, which gave her a new platform to showcase her talents as an actor and director.
In this time, she divorced twice and then met Robert Nadir in 1993 while performing in an Arizona Theater Company play. The two dated long-distance for a year before Tewes joined him in Seattle.
“I decided to change my whole life, which has been a wonderful thing for me,” she said in 1998. “The theater community here has been very responsive to me.”
The two married in 1996, but in 2002, Robert was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). He died the same year at age 46. It wasn’t the first time Lauren had gone through a family tragedy. In 1987, she lost her 1-month-old daughter, who passed after being born prematurely.
‘Victim of circumstance’
Her career never fully recovered, but she did have small appearances on TV shows like Who’s the Boss?, The Fugitive and Twin Peaks. Tewes also reunited with the original cast on an episode of The Love Boat: The Next Wave, which sees her character in a relationship with Doc.
However, she was not aboard the Princess Cruises’ latest Love Boat at Sea Celebration, a seven-night themed cruise that featured some original cast members from the TV show including Kopell, Lange, Whelan and Grandy, a congressman from 1987 to 1995. McLeod died in 2021 at age 90.
Though Tewes wasn’t present, she wasn’t forgotten by her former co-workers.
People reports that Whelan, now 57, said she frequently sees her old castmate, who will fly out to visit for a weekend, spending time “cooking and just laughing and sharing stories all the time.”
“We should talk about our pal, who is a sister to all of us,” says the former child star. “She’s just a very genuine, sweet human being, and by the way, a spectacular actress. I mean, I even look back at The Love Boat episodes and I just marvel at her and her ability to move so effortlessly between doing a dramatic scene and comedy. But she is one of our favorite people and we adore her.”
Meanwhile Grandy touched on her dismissal from the show, saying she “has recovered magnificently” and that the “the circumstances of her departure were not so lovely.”
“This would’ve been the early ’80s, substance abuse on a set in those days was a punishable offense,” Grandy, 76, said. “It was not a healthcare problem, and it was not understood in the way it is understood now. And to some degree, she was a victim of circumstance at the time because the attention and care and therapy she should have gotten was meted out in the form of discipline.”
Today she can be heard on Murder and the Murdochs, a comedy-mystery radio series that’s hosted by Imagination Theatre.
And, when she’s not busy acting, the now 70-year-old culinary artists spends her time sharpening her skills as a cheese specialist with a Seattle-based catering company.
“I hope and pray that that’s all past now,” Tewes tells the Los Angeles Times. “I think I made the right choices by trying to stay in the business while it was trying to keep me out, by following my own heart and my own drive, and by making the choice to stick it through.”
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