Comedic actress Betty White, who capped a career of more than 80 years by becoming America’s geriatric sweetheart after Emmy-winning roles on television sitcoms The Golden Girls and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, has died, less than three weeks shy of her 100th birthday, People magazine reported yesterday, quoting her agent.
Her agent and close friend Jeff Witjas told the magazine: “Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever.”
In a youth-driven entertainment industry where an actress over 40 is facing career twilight, White was an elderly anomaly who was a star well into her 60s and remained a pop culture phenomenon in her 80s and 90s.
Playing on her imminent likability, White was still starring in a TV sitcom, Hot in Cleveland, at age 92 until it was cancelled in late 2014.
White said her longevity was a result of good health, good fortune and loving her work.
“It’s incredible that I’m still in this business and that you are still putting up with me,” White said in an appearance at the 2018 Emmy Awards ceremony, where she was honoured for her long career. “It’s incredible that you can stay in a career this long and still have people put up with you. I wish they did that at home.”
White was not afraid to mock herself and throw out a joke about her life or a snarky crack that one would not expect from a sweet-smiling, white-haired elderly woman.
“Old age hasn’t diminished her,” the New York Times wrote in 2013. “It has given her a second wind.”
Betty Marion White was born on January 17, 1922, in Oak Park, Illinois, and her family moved to Los Angeles during the Great Depression, where she attended Beverly Hills High School.
White started her entertainment career in radio in the late 1930s and by 1939 had made her TV debut singing on an experimental channel in Los Angeles.
After serving in the American Women’s Voluntary Service, which helped the US effort during World War II, she was a regular on Hollywood on Television, a daily five-hour live variety show, in 1949.
A few years later she became a pioneering woman in television by co-founding a production company and serving as a co-creator, producer and star of the 1950s sitcom Life With Elizabeth.
Through the 1960s and early ’70s, White was seen regularly on television, hosting coverage of the annual Tournament of Rose Parade and appearing on game shows such as Match Game and Password.
She married Password host Allen Ludden, her third and final husband, in 1963.
White reached a new level of success on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, playing the host of a home-making television show, the snide Sue Ann Nivens, whose credo was “a woman who does a good job in the kitchen is sure to reap her rewards in other parts of the house”.
White won best-supporting actress Emmys for the role in 1975 and 1976.
She won another Emmy in 1986 for The Golden Girls, a sitcom about four older women living together in Miami that featured an age demographic rarely highlighted on television.
White also was nominated for an Emmy six other times for her portrayal of the widowed Rose Nylund, a sweet, naive and ditzy Midwesterner, on the show, which ran from 1985 to 1992 and was one of the top-rated series of its time.
White, who had no children, worked for animal causes.