She has won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series four times, which is tied for the record of most wins with Tyne Daly.

By the sixth season, as the show continued its success after the departure of co-star Richard Thomas (born 1951), these fears of confusion about her sex had been alleviated and the "Miss" was dropped from Learned's billing in the credits.

[7] Her character's abrupt disappearance in Season 7 was explained by Olivia developing tuberculosis and entering a sanatorium in hot and dry Arizona.

Learned made her big screen debut in 1980, playing the supporting role in the drama film Touched by Love.

In 2005, Learned played Judge Helen Turner on the ABC-TV network's daytime soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live as part of the "baby switch" storyline on both shows.

In the second season of The Secret World of Alex Mack, she guest-starred as a ghost who regretted the decisions of her long-estranged granddaughter, revealed at the end to be the show's main villain, Danielle Atron (Louan Gideon).

In late 2011, Learned played Katherine Chancellor on the CBS daytime soap opera, The Young and the Restless, filling in for longtime actress Jeanne Cooper, who was on extended medical leave from the series.

[9][10] In the late 1960s, Learned and her husband Peter Donat appeared in various roles with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California.

[13][14] In a 2002 article she wrote for the Daily Word, a publication of the Unity Church, Learned states that at the time she was cast in The Waltons in 1971, she had "hit rock bottom".

Taking herself to former husband Peter Donat's remote cabin on the California coast, she decided to "get sober" and that her time there was the beginning of a spiritual journey.