The actress and wicked wit who became TV’s Golden Girl
Betty White 1922–2021
Betty White’s small-screen career was one for the record books. In February 1939, a then 17-year-old White danced in front of the cameras for an experimental TV broadcast, and over the following eight decades was rarely absent from the medium. Though best known as a comedic actress, she was likely the first solo female talk show host in history and one of the few successful female producers of the 1950s. Dubbed the First Lady of Television, she worked on comedies, dramas, game shows, commercials, and televised parades. White had her most memorable roles in two classic sitcoms, as the nymphomaniacal Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the delightful but dim Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls, and cultivated a sunny, chipper persona that belied a wicked sense of humor. Asked at age 88 if there was anything left she would like to do, she replied, “Robert Redford.”
Born in Oak Park, Ill., and raised in Los Angeles, White was the only child of a radio repairman father and a homemaker mother. “She showed early interest in theater,” said The Washington Post, “and won several acting jobs on radio and stage.” Her career stalled during her brief 1945 marriage to a fighter pilot; the relationship ended when White realized she’d have to live on an Ohio chicken farm. In 1949, White joined a six-day-a-week Los Angeles TV talk show as the sidekick of Al Jarvis, said New York magazine. She succeeded him as host and soon won her first lead acting role in the sitcom Life With Elizabeth. White later hosted and produced her own variety show, The Betty White Show. When NBC pressured her to fire Black tap dancer Arthur Duncan because of complaints from local affiliates in the Jim Crow south, “she refused and increased his airtime. The show was canceled within the year.”
By the early 1960s, she was best known “as a very busy freelance guest” on game shows, said The New York Times. A regular panelist on Password, she married its host, Allen Ludden, in 1963, and their union lasted until his death in 1981. Her biggest acting break “came relatively late in life,” when she was cast in 1973 as Sue Ann—the annoyingly upbeat, sexually conniving host of a local household-hints program— on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. White won two Emmys for that role, and another in 1986 for The Golden Girls. White had initially read for the “lustful” Blanche Devereaux character, said Rolling Stone, but was instead cast as Rose, a cheerfully naïve widow who confounds her roommates with “surreal monologues” about her Minnesota hometown. “At times, she was so committed to the bit that even veteran co-stars like Rue McClanahan and Bea Arthur wound up breaking character” with fits of unscripted laughter.
A 1992 Golden Girls spinoff flopped, but “White was never really out of the public eye,” said CNN.com. A role in the 2009 movie The Proposal and a memorable Snickers commercial inspired a Facebook campaign to have her on Saturday Night Live, and in 2010 she became that show’s oldest-ever host. She worked well into her 90s, appearing on the 2010–2015 sitcom Hot in Cleveland and in 2019’s Toy Story 4 as Bitey White, a tiger-shaped chew toy. “I’m the luckiest old broad on two feet,” she said in 2017. “I will go to my grave saying, ‘Can I come in and read for that tomorrow?’”