R.I.P.: Betty White, TV's Golden Girl

Daily Mail screenshot 12/31/21

Betty White, the trailblazing television star whose more than eight-decade career saw her go from unforgettable roles on “The Golden Girls” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to becoming a cultural icon in her 80s and 90s, has died just weeks before her 100th birthday.

Law enforcement sources told TMZ the 99-year-old icon passed at home Friday morning, reports The NY Post.

The eight-time Emmy winner had just spoken to People for this week’s issue celebrating what would have been her birthday and said that she was “in such good health.”

“I try to avoid anything green. I think it’s working,” she quipped at the time.

White held the record for the longest TV career of any entertainer — making her debut in 1939 when the medium was just an experiment and going on to appear as an actress, host and in-demand guest well into her 90s.

But she’ll be best remembered for her scene-stealing roles in two pioneering sitcoms — as the promiscuous cooking show host Sue Ann Nivens on the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in the 1970s and sweet-natured simpleton Rose Nylund on “The Golden Girls” in the 80s.

“If an actor can get one great character in their career that’s something,” Syracuse University TV professor Robert Thompson told The Post. 

“Those two shows are her great legacy … because people will continue to watch that stuff. They’ve really got classic status.”

White was born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park on Jan. 17, 1922, the only child of parents Tess, a homemaker, and Horace White, an electrical engineer.

The family moved to California a few years later — eventually winding up in Los Angeles, where the future star grew up in the shadow of Hollywood.

She was bitten by the showbiz bug when she wrote herself into the lead role of a school play. She then scored her first TV gig just a month after graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1939 — singing “The Merry Widow” on an experimental local channel.

The appearance, at age 17, came months before the medium was introduced to the masses at the New York World’s Fair.

In 1952, White co-created and starred in a Saturday-night sitcom called “Life with Elizabeth” — becoming one of TV’s rare female producers and earning her first Emmy nomination.

She continued her pioneering role both in front and behind the camera with the short-lived NBC talk show “The Betty White Show” in 1954.

Some stations in the South threatened to pull the show off the air over the inclusion of African-American tap dancer Arthur Duncan in the cast, but White famously told them to “live with it.”

“She was probably one of the nicest, grandest, greatest people I’ve had the chance to meet in my life,” said Duncan in 2018. “Whenever she walked into a room, it lit up.”

During the 1960s, White became a regular guest on TV game shows — where she met her third and final husband, “Password” host Allen Ludden, who she stayed with until he died in 1981.

In 1973, the already popular “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was looking to cast the character of Sue Ann Nivens, described in the script as an “an icky-sweet Betty White type” — and ended up hiring the real thing.  

Nivens — a cooking show hostess at Mary Richards’ fictional TV station — was “cloyingly sweet on the surface and something of a dragon underneath, with a tinge of nymphomania,” White wrote in her 1995 memoir. “I was born for the role!”

For the 1970s, a character like that was “a big deal,” Thompson said.

“Sue Ann Nivens was a woman who enjoys sex and does things that allow her to satisfy that enjoyment. Betty White as Sue Ann Nivens was doing in the 1970s what ‘Sex and the City’ wouldn’t get around to the late 1990s,” he said.

The job netted White her first — and second — prime-time Emmy awards.

She followed the statue up with a third when she was cast on NBC’s “The Golden Girls” in 1985.

Initially, 63-year-old White was expecting to play the man-hungry Blanche Devereaux, but the pilot director felt it was too similar to her character on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” so instead she was gifted with the loveably dim-witted Rose Nylund.