Betty White, the leading television star whose career spanning more than eight decades has seen her turn from an unforgettable role in "The Golden Girls" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" into a cultural icon in the 80's and 90's, died less than three years after her 100th birthday. A few weeks ago.Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Mike Lopez told The Post that officers responded to a radio call at 9:30 a.m. Friday regarding a "natural death investigation" at the home of a 99-year-old man in Brentwood, Calif.
His agent and close friend Jeff Witzas later confirmed the news to People magazine.
"Although Betty is about 100 years old, I thought she would live forever," Witzas said in a statement.
"I will miss him terribly, as well as the animals he loved so much. I don't think Betty ever feared being sidelined because she always wanted to be with her dearest husband, Allen Luden. She believed he would be with her again. "She spoke to people to celebrate her birthday on this week's issue of the eight-time Emmy winner and said she was "in very good health."
“I try to avoid something green. I think it works, "he joked at the time.
Fans gathered outside White's home on Friday afternoon to pay their respects.
"We were hoping she would reach 100," Michael Douglas, 37, of LA, told The Post while wearing the "Golden Girls" face mask. "She was very sweet and caring. She was an American grandmother. I saw my grandmother in her. Our parents grew up watching her, and then we grew up watching her show. I'm so sorry."
Julie Stampas, 55, of LA, remembers many of White's contributions to Hollywood.
"She left us with a lot of memories, and she will never be forgotten," he told the Post. "He was such a pity. To me, he's like the old Hollywood that's no longer with us. It's like a bygone era. And he's one of the last people to symbolize that brave era in Hollywood."White holds the record for the longest TV career of any entertainer, making his debut in 1939 when the medium was just a test and is set to appear in the 90s as an actress, host and in-demand guest.
But he will be most remembered for his scene-stealing roles on two pioneering sitcoms - Sue Ann Nivens, the host of the cooking show on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in the 1970s, and the sweet-natured Simpleton Rose Nailund in "The Golden". Girls in the '80s.Robert Thompson, a TV professor at Syracuse University, told The Post: "If an actor can get a great character in their career, that's something.
"These two shows are his great legacy… because people will continue to see those things. They really got the classic status. "
White was born on January 17, 1922, in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, to parents Tess, the only child of Tess, a housekeeper, and Horace White, an electrical engineer.
The family moved to California a few years later - eventually ending in Los Angeles, where the future star grew up in the shadow of Hollywood.
He was bitten by a showbiz bug while writing himself as the protagonist of a school play. Just a month after graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1939, she made her first TV gig - singing "The Mary Widow" on an experimental local channel.
The appearance, at the age of 17, came a few months before the medium was introduced to the public at the New York World's Fair.
"Betty White's career in television goes back to all purpose and purpose, before television," Thompson said. "In 1939 no one had a TV."
She took a break from the small screen during World War II, worked in the American Women's Volunteer Service, and briefly married a fighter pilot named Dick Barker, but returned with a small portion to a local station in the late 1940s.
By then, less than a thousand people in Los Angeles had a TV, White said in his 1995 memoir.
White's first major role was as a co-host on the daytime talk show "Hollywood on Television" - five-and-a-half hours of airtime, six-day free-wheeling banners, celebrity interviews, skits and live commercials.
"It was our or test pattern," White once quipped - but she said her second husband, Hollywood agent Lane Allen, could not marry a busy working woman and the union broke up two years later.In 1952, White co-created and starred in a Saturday-night sitcom called "Life with Elizabeth" - becoming one of the rarest female TV producers and earning her first Emmy nomination.
She continued her pioneering role, both in front and behind the camera, on the 1954 short-lived NBC talk show "The Betty White Show."Some stations in the South threatened to shut down the show because African-American tap dancer Arthur Duncan was included in the cast, but White famously told them to "live with it."
In 2018, Duncan said, "She's probably the most beautiful, the greatest, the best in my life Game show - where she met her third and final husband, "Password" host Allen Luden, with whom she lived until her death in 1981.In 1973, she wanted to play the already popular "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" character Sue Annevenes, described in the script as "an Ikea-Sweet Betty White type" - and the real thing is over.
Nivens - the host of a cooking show on Mary Richards' fictional TV station - had "something very sweet on the surface and like a dragon with a hint of nymphomania," White wrote in his 1995 memoir. "I was born for the role!"
For the 1970s, a character like this was "a big deal," Thompson said.
"Sue Ann Nivens was a woman who enjoys sex and does things that allow her to enjoy it. In the role of Sue Ann Nivens, Betty White was doing in the 1970s what 'Sex and the City' would find in the late 1990s." No, "he said.
This job earned White his first - and second - prime-time Emmy Award. She followed the statue with the third while casting on NBC's "The Golden Girls" in 1985.
Initially, the 63-year-old White was hoping to play the man-hungry Blanche Devereaux, but the pilot director felt it was too similar to his character in "Mary Tyler Moore Show", so instead he was gifted a beautiful fade. - Intelligent Rose Nilund.
It was an inspired decision, according to Thompson.
"The way she shows this kind of innocent 'I don't know what you're talking about' is when someone starts talking about sex - but at the same time, we know she's a widow," he said.
"Betty White had a lot of fun knowing who was actually pronouncing these words."
“I’m grateful for the work and it started early,” White told the Post in 2018 at the age of 96.
"When you start you are grateful for a job… and you carry that feeling throughout your career. At least I have."
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