Last of the Golden Girls Betty Marion Ludden takes final bow aged 99

Last week, we lost the last of The Golden Girls, Betty White, just 17 days shy of her 100th birthday.

The self-described “lucky old broad” whose sweetly sarcastic senior citizen characters were a fixture on TV shows and movies such as “The Golden Girls”, “Boston Legal”, and “Hot in Cleveland” died in her sleep on Friday 31 December.

I particularly remember Betty White as Rose Nyland in the popular sitcom “The Golden Girls” (1985-1992). Rose Nyland was a naïve but humorous country girl who often told peculiar stories about growing up in her hometown.

Betty White, with her audacious and unabashed humour, fitted the role perfectly. I made sure not to miss any episode and the bawdy slapstick humour.

Born on 17 January 1922, in Oak Park, Illinois, Betty Marion White, an only child, moved with her parents, traveling salesman and electrical engineer Horace White and homemaker Tess Curtis White, to Los Angeles during the Great Depression.

Looking to make ends meet during those difficult times, her parents started to rear and sell animals and once a year the family camped out in the Sierra Nevadas, which fuelled Betty’s love for animals. In a 1999 interview, Betty said, “We wound up with 26 dogs once.”

As a child, Betty dreamed of becoming a forest ranger or a writer, only to fall in love with performing when she took the lead role in the high school senior play that she wrote.

She skipped college and began performing on the radio, but before launching an acting career. She married twice: first to Dick Barker, a WWI pilot she wed in 1945 (the marriage lasted a few months after he took her to an Ohio chicken farm because she did not fancy spending the rest of her life with chicken), then in 1947 to agent Lane Allen, who wanted her to give up showbiz, which again was a definite no-no for Betty.

When her second marriage ended in 1949, she and an LA deejay named Al Jarvis got their feet wet together on local TV, which eventually paved the way for her first sitcom, “Life with Elizabeth.” Despite its low budget and minimal sets, the show earned Betty her first Emmy.

After Jarvis left in 1952, Betty began hosting the show by herself and it became nationally syndicated running up to 1955. This allowed Betty to become one of the first women on TV with full creative control in front of and behind the camera.

From 1952, Betty also hosted her own daily talk/variety show, “The Betty White Show” on NBC. Like her sitcom, she had creative control over the series and was able to hire a female director.

In a first for American network variety TV, her show featured an African-American performer, but the show faced criticism for the inclusion of tap dancer Arthur Duncan as a regular cast member. The criticism followed when NBC expanded the show nationwide. Local Southern stations in the Jim Crow era threatened to boycott unless Duncan was removed from the series.

In response, Betty said, “I am sorry. Live with it,” and gave Duncan even more airtime. Initially a rating success, because of Betty’s stubborn stand against discrimination on the basis of colour, the show repeatedly changed time slots and suffered low viewership. By the end of the year, NBC caved in and cancelled the show.

Following the end of “Life with Elizabeth”, she appeared as Vicki Angel on the ABC sitcom “Date with the Angels”.

Although the sitcom was a critical and rating disaster, this is when Betty met Lucille Ball as her show “I Love Lucy” was being filmed in the same Culver Studios lot.

The two quickly struck up a long-lasting friendship over their accomplishments in taking on the male-dominated TV business of the 1950s.

By the 1960s, Betty was a staple of network game shows and talk shows, including both “Jack Paar” and later Johnny Carson’s era of “The Tonight Show”. She made many appearances on the hit “Password” as a celebrity guest from 1961 through 1975. In 1963, she married the show’s host, Allen Ludden.

In 1973, Betty made several appearances in the fourth season of “The Mary Tyler Show”, as the “man-hungry” Sue Ann Evans.

The role garnered Betty her second and third Emmy Awards. Although considering the role as the highlight of her career, she described the character’s image as “icky sweet”, feeling she was the very embodiment of female passivity, owing to the fact that she always satirised her own persona on screen.

In 1983, Betty became the first woman to win a Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Game Show Host, for the NBC entry “Just Men”.

From 1983 to 1984, Betty had a recurring role, playing Ellen Harper Jackson on the series “Mama’s Family” along with “The Golden Girls” co-star Rue McClanahan. Betty had originated this character in a series of sketches on “The Carol Burnett Show” in the 1970s.

From 1985, Betty scored the biggest hit in her career in “The Golden Girls” in which she won yet another Emmy.

“The Golden Girls” ended in 1992 and Betty appeared in several TV programmes such as “Suddenly Susan”, “The Practice”, “The Bold and the Beautiful”, and “Boston Legal”, winning more awards along the way.

In December 2021, it was announced that a new documentary style about her, “Betty White: A Celebration” would be released in US theatres on her birthday, 17 December 2022.

Following her death, the producers have announced that the pre-filmed production will take place as planned. Betty White would not have it any other way; even death would not stop her.

In an interview last year, Betty quipped, “All my life, even as a kid, I have preferred men older than I am. Unfortunately, today, I don’t think there is anyone older than I am!”

Betty White, you lived a full life. May you rest in celestial peace!