#rip estelle getty

[rachelkaser]

Stay Golden Sunday: Estelle Getty, In Memoriam

It's been over 15 years since we lost Estelle Getty, the first of the four main actresses of The Golden Girls to die. Let's take time to honor the life and accomplishments of another of the extraordinary women who starred in this show.

Picture It, Sicily...

When I first did an In Memoriam post, at the beginning of 2022, it was because the incomparable Betty White had just died. I wanted to take that moment, more than ever before, to talk about her fascinating life and the work she did, for The Golden Girls in particular. It's impossible to overstate how hard that hit us GG fans -- we were all hoping she'd live forever.

Sadly, all four of main actresses from the show are gone, so I don't have an urgent need to do another post, but I wanted to go over the others' lives just as I did for Betty. As much as we love and adore the characters they play, we shouldn't forget the interesting, extraordinary women who put in the work for our favorite show. And since Season Four features a substantial increase in Sophia time, I felt Estelle Getty was an appropriate choice.

Estelle Getty (whose real last name was Gettleman) is probably the actress about whom I know the least, if only because her career was not quite as well-documented as the other ladies. When the show began, she was the relative underdog of the cast, in the sense that Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Betty White already had several major TV shows on their resumes.

Getty, not so much -- though it certainly wasn't for lack of trying. She achieved her "big break" fairly late in her life, but she had worked in show business for a very long time -- since her youth, in fact. She was also, like her costars, an outspoken activist, particularly for gay rights and AIDS victims.

That being said, the more I learn about Getty, the more I grow to admire and respect her. Most of the behind-the-scenes tidbits I've gleaned has focused on some of Getty's limitations. She was working at significant disadvantages every time she was onscreen, and she still managed to frequently steal the show from her more-experienced costars.

So this week, let's take a look at the life and career of the woman who brought the wizened wisecracker Sophia Petrillo to life. Who was Estelle Getty, and how did she come to be a star on The Golden Girls?

"Sticks and stones can break your bones, but cement pays homage to tradition."

Estelle Scher was born on July 25, 1923 in New York City, the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants. She quickly developed a fondness for theater and comedy, and tried for several years to get her break on the stage in New York. In fact, for most of her career, Getty was a New York-based actress. She married Arthur Gettleman in 1947 and had two sons, and kept auditioning for roles while working full-time and taking care of her family.

According to an account in the Jewish Women's Archive, Getty's friendship with actor-playwright Harvey Fierstein was the source of her most important role pre-GG. When he wrote his autobiographical play Torch Song Trilogy, he wrote the mother character, Ma Beckoff, with Getty in mind, and she originated the role both on and off Broadway. Getty, who was in her fifties at the time, eventually made it to Hollywood while doing the West Coast tour of Torch Song.

I'm not exaggerating when I say the story of Estelle Getty should be everyone's case study for why you should never give up on your dreams. She was in her fifties when she got her break on stage, and sixty-two when she landed the role that would make her a household name. She was sixty-five when she won her Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress.

That's not to say that her career is the only noteworthy thing about Getty. She was also notable for being an advocate for gay rights and for victims of HIV/AIDS -- during the 1980s hysteria, no less. She cared for her own nephew when he was struck with the disease, and later helped open a hospice for victims in his hometown after his death. She also professed to having many LGBTQ+ friends in show business (many of whom she'd sadly lost to the disease) and once said in an interview that one of the lines she drew was never doing "gay-bashing" jokes.

Getty died just a few days shy of her 85th birthday in 2008, and afterwards her family revealed she suffered from Lewy body dementia (which you might recognize as the same illness Robin Williams had at the time of his death). Her costars said, in a melancholy interview, that by the time of her death, she wasn't lucid enough to speak for long and rarely recognized them -- but that they loved and admired her to the very end.

"You're old, you sag, get over it."

When the casting directors at NBC began work on The Golden Girls, Sophia was allegedly one of the first parts they focused on. According to Jim Colucci's Golden Girls Forever, they believed that the role of the spicy octogenarian was going to be one of the hardest to cast -- they weren't even sure what she would look like. Getty had previously auditioned for (and lost) a part in NBC's Family Ties, and casting director Judith Weiner remembered her.

I'm going by anecdotes in the same book, but apparently Getty had all but given up on Hollywood and was only in town for two months in 1985 -- during which time she auditioned for the show. Strangely, Getty's talents at playing mothers almost failed her at this point. She was at first dismissed as a viable candidate for Sophia because, at sixty-something, she was too young. But according to her memoir, she knew she could play older mothers, so she mixed her own background with Sophia's, creating the Brooklyn-Italian woman we all now know.

Tony Thomas was the first of the three producers who saw Getty audition, and he immediately told Paul Witt and Susan Harris that they had to see her. They called her back several times and all three loved her performance, with their only apparent reservation being that she was too young. Getty's manager hired a makeup artist to give Getty wrinkles during one of her auditions to show she could look the part. By the time of her final audition, the role was already hers.

It was during this point that Getty also obtained one of (if not the) most iconic Golden Girls props of all time -- Sophia's bamboo purse. She found it in a thrift store in Los Angeles while putting together an audition costume, and it remained her primary prop for all seven seasons. Estelle Getty may not have been the biggest name they snagged at the time of casting, but she seemed to have committed throughout the process to show how she could play the 80-year-old Italian mama.

Now we get to some of the background on Getty, and the reasons why I admire her so much. In my main SGS recaps, I sometimes complain or ding an episode's rating because Sophia is not in much of the episode. However, I want to note that I know there is a good reason for this: Estelle Getty had crippling stage fright, and the writers and producers frequently pared down Sophia's roles in order to accommodate her.

According to interviews with her costars and the crew of the show, Getty would frequently have trouble with her lines, and would sometimes have to redo them after the studio audience had been sent home. That's also one of the reasons why The Golden Girls never aired a live episode, despite having at least one opportunity to do so. I believe at least some credit has to go to the show's editors for making Getty's performances look so seamless, but most of my admiration goes to Getty for having the guts to give such good work when just doing her job caused her such anxiety.

Betty White also added in an interview that Getty was afraid of death, and was deeply unhappy whenever the writers wrote jokes about death or brought the topic into the show. And, if you know anything about Golden Girls, you know this happened quite frequently. But would you ever be able to tell that from watching the show? I don't think you could.

"Not part of the show, people! Not part of the show!"

Getty's personal history is one of the primary influences for Sophia's character, and it was under her guidance that the "fat Italian mama with a bun" (the producers' words, not mine) became the acerbic Brooklyn-Italian grandmother. Getty's particular kind of humor was honed by years on New York-based stage work and a childhood love of vaudeville, and you can clearly see this in how physical comedy is always a component of everything Sophia does.

Sophia's a complicated character, for all that she sometimes only appears in episodes for a few quick lines. She's witty and feisty, yes, and there's no one who's too high and mighty that she can't knock them down a peg. She has barbs for every single one of her roommates, reminding Rose that she's dumb, Blanche that she's old, and Dorothy that she's single at every opportunity.

Throughout the show, there's a suggestion that Sophia's attitude towards others is in part her way of caring. In "On Golden Girls," she deals Blanche's grandson a solid clock to the cheek when he gets in her face, and Dorothy later tells him that she wouldn't have dealt this blow if she didn't care about him. In "Comedy of Errors," she uses a few well-placed heckles to help Dorothy find her groove when she tries stand-up comedy. As she herself says in "The Heart Attack," she's not an affectionate person and doesn't always show her love in the traditional way, but she leaves her loved ones in no doubt of her care and regard.

Like all the Girls, Sophia will stand up for herself and her loved ones when the occasion calls for it, but notably, she usually does so in subtler ways than the others do. There's no shoving little girls out of doors or calling out of asshole men -- she's not so ostentatious as that. Instead, Sophia is the type to defend her Girls from themselves. The first instance I can think of is in "Joust Between Friends" where she breaks the tension between Blanche and Dorothy and rubs Blanche's nose in it, to boot.

I'll go even further: I think her most awesome moments on the show are when she humbles the others. It's a running gag that Sophia is sometimes pushed out of things by the other Girls, including vacations and outings. Perhaps her best moment was in "Ladies of the Evening," when she not only swiped the Girls' Burt Reynolds tickets, but managed to charm several celebrities, including Burt, in her evening with them -- all after they were planning to leave her behind.

"They had said he would never walk again. He walked."

That said, Sophia was not without her layers. For all her outward acceptance of gay people, such as Jean and Clayton, she's less willing to accept her son Phil's crossdressing. "Ebbtide's Revenge" is the culmination of her intolerance, as she confesses, after much prodding, that she couldn't understand Phil and that led her to alienate him for the rest of his life. Getty struggled with this episode, and eventually put her foot down when the writers expected her to make a joke while Sophia is standing over her son's body in a casket. I think I speak for all of us when I express my appreciation of that particular choice.

There's also the implication that Sophia's wit and acidity are born from a need to protect herself. She says outright in "All Bets Are Off" that her insults are a defense mechanism. This is also apparent in "Old Friends," when Dorothy breaks the news to her that her friend Alvin has Alzheimer's Disease. Sophia at first cracks a joke, then earnestly tells Dorothy that she might be happier not knowing. I've said it's one of the finest pieces of acting in the show's run, and I still stand by that. Getty's performance of a woman going through the stages of grief over such bad news is a heartbreaker.

Sophia's not a perfect human being and she can be unnecessarily mean sometimes: Pretending to be possessed by Rose's dead husband for $20 in "Where's Charlie?" springs to mind. However, Getty played Sophia as being capable of learning and growing. In "72 Hours," upon learning Rose might have AIDS, Sophia initially balks at touching anything she has touched, even marking Rose's coffee cup with an R. By the end of the episode, she's happily drinking out of one such marked cup. I can't imagine Getty being happy about Sophia being the "villain" of the episode, but I hope she eventually understood how important and monumental the episode in general -- and Sophia's growth in particular -- were for the time.

"I'm old. I'm supposed to be colorful."

Let's wrap up this post with a collection of some of Getty's sharpest deliveries in a compilation of Sophia insults:

[duranduratulsa]

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[slystallone]

Sylvester Stallone & Estelle Getty

[postyxmendes]

this one hurts but they’re all back together again 🥺🤍

[nonbinary-gothb1tch]

You know you miss the Golden Girls when you wake up from a dream where you’re walking through a cobblestone path in a garden, slowly but surely running into each one of them individually. (I never got to Betty white though before I woke up 😔 )

I got some wisdom from Blanche. She said “I realize now what true happiness is. You see that sparkle in your eyes and your youth? That is what happiness truly feels like. I realize now it isn’t just gardening. [referencing hobbies people enjoy] You don’t have to be young to be youthful. Keep that sparkle. That’s where true happiness lies.”

[just-your-casual-nerd]

Rest in Peace Betty White. You will be missed, I hope you are with your love once again ❤️

[noelley2002]

Rest In Peace my Idol

[thejcube]

[littletroubledgrrrl]

"Golden Girls" Itty Bittys.

RIP to Betty White as well as Rue McClanahan, Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty

Thank you for being a friend!

[jonosmatt]

RIP Betty White

[rachelkaser]

Stay Golden Sunday: Betty White, In Memoriam

Betty White, the last member of the Golden Girls, died on December 31, 2021. Let’s look back with fondness on her time with the show, and what she brought to the character of Rose Nylund.

Back in St. Olaf...

Well, this is it, isn’t it? Our very own Stay Golden Sunday Very Special Episode. The great Betty White, last surviving member of the main cast of The Golden Girls, died on December 31. She was just a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday. It’s really, truly the end of an era and she will be missed so much by all of us.

The logical side of my brain has always known Betty White’s death would almost certainly happen before I reached the end of this column. I’m barely halfway through the second of seven seasons. But the emotional side of me was absolutely, irrationally hoping she would live forever. So I never prepared anything, and I’m writing this SGS mostly off the cuff.

It seems I wasn’t the only one, either. Her agent, Jeff Witjas, told People, “Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever.” One of my favorite memes is just a picture of her that says, “We need to start thinking about what kind of world we’re going to leave behind for Betty White.”

White was, by every single account I’ve been able to find, an exceptional human being -- an animal rights activist, an anti-racist crusader, a staunch LGBTQ+ ally (the latter two in times when being so was even more difficult and dangerous than it is now). She remained funny, sassy, and endearing right to the end, teasing Ryan Reynolds in one of her final interviews.

So instead of an episode recap this week, let’s take a look at the extraordinary life of Betty White, her role as Rose Nylund in The Golden Girls, and her most extraordinary moments on the show.

“The older you get, the better you get . . . unless you’re a banana.”

I wish I could go over all the specifics of Betty White’s extraordinary life and career, but I’ll stick to the basics. She was born on January 17, 1922 in Illinois, and lived in California during the Great Depression. In case you ever wonder how far back her animal activism goes, apparently she originally wanted to be a forest ranger. Sadly, it was not a career open to women at the time. She later served as a volunteer during World War II.

After discovering her interest in performing, she began her career on the radio and even appeared on an experimental transmission -- meaning she was on TV before it was even officially a “thing.” She eventually transitioned fully to TV with the show Life with Elizabeth. She apparently became the first woman to produce a sitcom with that show, as well as the first to have control both in front of and behind the camera, or at least according to Wikipedia. She beat even Lucille Ball in that regard, which is absolutely something worth remembering. The two were also good friends.

She later became regular panelist on popular game shows, and would become even more well-known on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She played Sue Ann Nivens, a cynical, man-eating parody of the sickly sweet homemaker women who appeared in other sitcoms. I think she’s probably best summarized by this clip.

I swear this woman could make a marble statue laugh. She also, over the course of this time, had several iterations of her own show called, appropriately, The Betty White Show.

White met her third husband, Allen Ludden, at a filming of the game show Password in 1961. She frequently described Ludden as the love of her life, and remained with him until his death in 1981. She never remarried after that, as she said she’d already had her perfect love story. Reportedly, she kept a photo of Ludden on her bedside table and would blow him a kiss every morning.

Because this is a Golden Girls column, I’m going to focus on her role in the show and how she got it, but I seriously cannot overstate just how incredible this woman’s life and career is. Let’s be clear, we’re not just mourning the woman who played Rose Nylund. We’re mourning one of the most interesting pioneers in the history of television and entertainment. I also want to salute her for choosing to focus on said career over having children, even divorcing her second husband, Lane Allen, because he wanted kids and she didn’t. For the time period that was, if you’ll pardon the expression, pretty ballsy of her.

Anyway, White was approached originally to audition for the role of Blanche, as that character seemed the closest to her previous role as Sue Ann. Rue McClanahan, who was at the time best known for playing the ditzy Vivian on Maude, was shortlisted for the role of Rose. Neither woman was terribly enthused about their selected role, but they loved the script and wanted to be part of it. It was Jay Sandrich, the director of the pilot episode, who made possibly one of the greatest decisions in television history: He asked Rue and Betty to read for each other’s parts.

McClanahan loved the role of Blanche and had wanted to play her all along, but White had to be convinced that Rose was the role for her. Sandrich basically described Rose as the ultimate innocent, who takes everything literally and doesn’t have a devious bone in her body. According to White (via Golden Girls Forever), “And when he said that, it made sense for me... And Rue took Blanche and went with her where I never would have had the guts to go. So it just worked out beautifully.”

Not only was this a great decision for the two characters and actresses, apparently it was instrumental in getting Bea Arthur, the last to be added to the main cast, on board with the show. When Rue, who’d been asked by Susan Harris to help persuade her, called her, Bea said she had no interest in doing, “Maude and Vivian meet Sue Ann Nivens.” Rue responded, “That’s not the way we’re going to play it, Bea. I’m going to play the Sue Ann Nivens vamp, and Betty’s going to play the Vivian role.” That made Arthur take notice.

The pilot episode was filmed on April 17, 1985 in front of a live audience at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. Betty White, along with all her costars, captured the attention of the whole world that day. The pilot was filmed twice in front of two separate groups of people, but both times they got huge laughs and everyone immediately knew this was a hit.

“That moose not only raised Little Yiminiy -- he put him through medical school!”

Betty White as Rose Nylund is, hands down, one of the funniest performances ever aired on television. I mean, let’s completely bare our biases here: Every single character on The Golden Girls is easily in the top 10 of all TV characters (my personal top 4, honestly). They’re a perfect combination of well-cast actresses and excellent writers. But focusing on Rose specifically, there’s something truly special about her.

Rose is, for one, a character who’s unfailingly kind and lovely. She’s charitably minded, and has a nice word to say about almost everyone. She’s a comforting and warm presence, even when she’s only the tertiary character in the episode. She’s almost always the one interacting with animals on set (which I have to believe was something Betty insisted on), whether it be dogs, pigs or chickens.

It’s because of that caring nature that the few times Rose seriously loses her temper, or where she discards her scruples for whatever reason, are among the most memorable in the show’s history. The first time Rose showed there was more to her is in Season 1′s “The Triangle,” where she managed to trap a philanderer into a public confession with only seconds of planning. Most people remember Rose’s response to a question about her leaking roof:

DOROTHY: *seeing Rose come out of her room with buckets* Hi Rose. The ceiling in your room leaking too? ROSE: No, Dorothy. I just finished milking the cow I keep in my closet. Gee, with only three hours’ sleep, I can be as bitchy as you.

Make no mistake, when Rose was done fucking around, Betty had an amazing way of riding the line between keeping true to the character while also giving her a glorious moment to shine. My favorite moment out of all of them is in Season 3, Episode 1, “Old Friends.”

I haven’t yet written my SGS about this episode, so I’ll keep a recap to a minimum, but suffice to say Rose’s teddy bear is mistakenly given to a girl, who uses the opportunity to try and milk the Girls for some blackmail money. At the end of the episode, Rose at first starts to say that perhaps it’s time she let her teddy go, and then shows the child in the best way just how little weight she has to throw around.

Even Rose’s flaws were hilarious: For starters, she had a mean competitive streak that frequently put her at odds with the other Girls. It started in Season 1 with “The Competition,” when she showed her first sign of a darker side during a bowling tournament. Later she would somehow finagle her way into a coaching role around children -- perhaps not a good idea given her nature.

Another major flaw was her sometimes toxic positivity. Not everyone was comfortable being around someone so cheery, and at her worst Rose would not accept that she wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. In Season 5, Episode 9, “Comedy of Errors,” she harasses a coworker who makes it clear he’d prefer that she leave him alone -- where we learn that Rose apparently puts on puppet shows at work. Because of course she does.

“You know the rules. I get the rose.”

But it’s not just the silly stuff for which we remember Rose. To be sure, Betty White was fantastic at that kind of comedy -- the wide-eyed innocence and the occasional flashes of deviousness and rage. But her best moments on the show were when things slowed down, and she got to show that she could absolutely make you cry.

I have a whole plethora of scenes I could use for this example, but I’ll use three just to keep this brief. First, the scene in Season 2′s “Piece of Cake,” when she recounts her final birthday in St. Olaf. Rose explains to her late husband Charlie that she’s decided to move away from Minnesota so she can move on with her life. Betty White said in interviews that she put a lot of her love for Allen Ludden into Rose’s love for Charlie. That moment at the end of the scene when she tells Charlie she loves him and misses him as her voice breaks . . . well, I refuse to believe anyone out there couldn’t be touched by the real love and devotion Betty is showing us at that moment.

The second scene is Rose’s despair during the events of “Rose Fights Back.” I’m not exactly sure why (though I have theories) Rose was often saddled with episodes about societal problems, but she got no less than two episodes about ageism in the job market. When she hits her lowest moment, she describes seeing herself in the person of a local homeless woman. It’s one of those moments when Rose, for all her bubbly good nature, revealed she’s a lot more aware of the ills of the world than she generally communicates. She finishes with the line, “God, what am I going to do?” and, as someone who’s been without a job or prospects in my life, my heart breaks for her.

The third scene is in “Ebbtide’s Revenge,” after the death of Phil. Rose doesn’t play much of a part in the episode until the very end. That’s when she reminds everyone that she was a grief counselor, and within minutes manages to resolve the situation between Sophia and her daughter-in-law Angela. Granted, she does so with a rather tortured St. Olaf story, but she delivers some of the most compassionate, sensible, and intelligent lines on the show to Sophia, and it’s enough to finally break the emotional stalemate. Betty was excellent at portraying Rose’s smarter moments but, even more than that, she was excellent at showing how Rose was, at heart, just the best kind of a person.

“I know no one wants to hear one of my stories right now.”

Let’s wrap this up with a compilation of some of Betty White’s best moments on the show.

[duranduratulsa]

Now showing on my 80's Fest Movie 🎥 Marathon...The Golden Girls: The Engagement (1985) on classic DVD 📀! #tv #television #comedy #sitcom #thegoldengirls #theengagement #dvd #80s #80sfest #beaarthur #ripbeaarthur #estellegetty #ripestellegetty #bettywhite #RIPBettyWhite #ruemcclanahan #ripruemcclanahan

[glenncoco4]

Golden Girl reference? I’m here for it!

[alsharira]

Rip Estelle Getty (1923-2008), Bea Arthur (1922-2009), Rue McClanahan (1934-2010) and Betty White (1922-2021).

[nikkiscarlet]

:(