Ted Lange Kissed Diahann Carroll '15 Times' on “The Love Boat” Set 'Before She Realized I Was Messing Up on Purpose,' He Says

Ted Lange apparently made the most of his scenes with Diahann Carroll on The Love Boat.

The iconic series, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986 was famed for its A-list guest stars, and on the most recent episode of Steve Kmetko’s podcast Still Here Hollywood, the host asked Lange, 77, to name to name his favorites.

Alongside Gene Kelly, who appeared in a 1984 episode, Lange name-checked another Hollywood legend: Diahann Carroll.

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The Tony- and Golden Globe Award-winning actress and singer guest starred in a 1977 Love Boat episode in which her character, singer Roxy Blue, has an affair with her No. 1 fan, MS Pacific Princess head bartender Isaac Washington (Lange).

Lange seems to have shared his character’s enthusiasm for the Porgy and Bess star, intentionally botching one scene repeatedly to get more … face time with her.

“I kissed Diahann Carroll about 15 times before she realized I was messing up on purpose,” Lange recalled.

But, he added, Carroll eventually caught on to his shenanigans.

“So then she said, ‘Hey, hey, Cut that out,’ ” he explained. “I said, ‘Okay. I'm sorry. You're just so beautiful.’ ”

Lange agreed with Kmetko who enthused that Carroll, who died at the age of 84 in 2019, was “one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”

“Gorgeous,” Lange said. “And she could kiss.”

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Lange added that he and costar Fred Grandy, who played the ship’s chief purser Burl “Gopher” Smith, would frequently take the show's storied guest stars out to lunch where they would pump them for tales of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

“Fred Grandy and I had a thing called the Goldwyn Club where we would take the older guest stars and take them out to lunch,” he explained. “The great thing about our show is that we would have those rising like Tom Hanks and Martin Short and Billy Crystal, and those that had been retired and were coming back and kinda doing a — maybe even a swan song appearance.”

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Lange and Carroll's love story came early in the series, in the fifth episode of The Love Boat's first season. But elsewhere in his conversation with Kmetko, the actor said he struggled to get romantic storylines featuring his character onto the show.

“We had a producer [who] didn't wanna write for me,” Lange claimed. “He didn't want to write love stories for a Black character.”

Ultimately, he said, costars Grandy and Bernie Kopell took it upon themselves to write a storyline involving Isaac. "They wrote a love story for me because this guy wouldn't do it,” Lange said.

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