Actor Ted Lange still has fond memories of the time that Diahann Carroll appeared on a 1977 episode of his show, The Love Boat.
Lange played bartender Isaac Watson on all nine seasons of the ABC dramedy, which aired until 1986, and was he ever excited — perhaps too excited — to share a moment with his leading lady.
“I kissed Diahann Carroll about 15 times before she realized I was messing up on purpose,” Lange said on the Still Here Hollywood podcast hosted by Steve Kmetko. “So then she said, ‘Hey, hey, cut that out!'”
Lange said that he immediately apologized for his behavior.
“You’re just so beautiful,” he recalled telling Carroll.
“And she could kiss.” Lange said, before laughing. “That’s my claim to fame!”
More seriously, he said that the Oscar nominee, who later appeared on series including A Different World, Grey’s Anatomy, and White Collar, had been “a delight.”
The kissing took place when the long-running show was still a freshman. He and Carroll shared the screen in only the fifth episode of season 1, in which Isaac finds himself romancing his favorite singer, Roxy Blue, who was played by the actress.
Carroll, was already familiar to TV audiences by the time she appeared on The Love Boat. Most significantly, she had starred on the groundbreaking sitcom Julia, which depicted a Black, widowed nurse raising her son alone, from 1968 to 1971. (She received her second Emmy nomination for the part; her first was for a 1962 episode of police procedural Naked City.)
The veteran actress died in 2019 of cancer. She was 84.
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After The Love Boat, Lange continued acting in projects such as In the Heat of the Night, General Hospital, The Cleveland Show, and Are We There Yet?.
Ahead of his conversation about Carroll, the actor had wisely made a point to say he was sorry for talking about it to his wife off-camera.