Entertainment

Betty White, beloved and pioneering actress, dies at 99


Witjas said: ‘Even though Betty is almost 100 years old, I still think she will live forever. “I will miss her terribly and neither will the animal world she so dearly loves. I don’t think Betty has ever been scared away because she always wanted to be with her most beloved husband, Allen Ludden. She believes she will be with him again.” “

CNN has reached out to Witjas for comment.

During the first half of her career – eventually recognized by the Guinness World Records as the longest-running female television artist – White was a regular on radio and television.

There were ’50s sitcoms, a 1954 talk show, and even a role in the 1962 movie “Advice and Consent.” She occasionally appeared on game shows, especially especially “Password”, organized by her third husband, Allen Ludden.

“It’s a little out of the ordinary, a little out of character, … you shouldn’t be funny,” White recalled in a 2017 Interview with CNN, flashbacks to her early days in Hollywood. Noting that women at the time were expected to simply “come in and be pretty,” White countered: “No, it’s a lot more fun to laugh at.”

But starting with her performance as kitchen diva Sue Ann Nivens on the 1970s sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” – starting when she was 51 – White developed a knack for portraying tall people. A pure, sincere Midwestern man with an unusual inner life. In doing so, she created a new generation of fans, a base that only grew as she entered her 90s.

She’s the sexually experienced, if not naive, Rose Nylund in “The Golden Girls.”

White also played a mean and sometimes violent secretary on “Boston Legal”. She had a guest spot on “The Simpsons”, hosted “Saturday Night Live” – ​​the oldest person ever to do so – and even appeared in a self-mocking ad for the Snickers candy bar. .

Through it all, she takes her success – if not her job – lightly.

“I’m having the time of my life, and the fact that I’m still working – how lucky can you be?” she told Huffington Post 2012.

Betty White intends to appear on television.

At the age of 17, in 1939, she participated in an experimental television show. The technology was still in its infancy, having made its public debut at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

“I danced in an experimental television show, the first one on the West Coast, in downtown Los Angeles,” she told Guinness World Records. “I wore my high school graduation gown and our Beverly Hills high school student body president, Harry Bennett, and I danced to ‘Merry Widow Waltz.’ ”

White is a native of the Midwest, born in Oak Park, Illinois, on January 17, 1922. (Her name is officially Betty, not Elizabeth.) Her mother is a homemaker, and her father is a superintendent. CEO of an electric company.

When she was 2, her family moved to the Los Angeles area, where her father started producing radios. During the business downturn, the business became so stressful that, at one point, he traded them for dogs, hoping it would turn into a business. White remembers her family had about 20 dogs at a time. She became a lifelong animal lover.

White attended Beverly Hills High School and at one point wrote a play in which she cast herself as the lead. “I guess that’s when the bug bites,” she told the Archive of American Television.

White became a model after appearing on television, although her career was interrupted by World War II, during which she served in the American Women’s Volunteer Service.

After the war, she worked in theater and eventually began getting radio roles on shows like “The Great Gildersleeve” and “Blondie”. In 1949, a Los Angeles radio host, Al Jarvis, asked her to be his “sixth girl” in a live 5 1/2 hour television show that was intended to be the show. His radio show was on television but soon became a variety show- talk show, “Hollywood on Television.”

“It was like getting into television college,” she recalls. After more than two years, White became the sole host of the show.

She participated in other shows: a syndicated show, “Life with Elizabeth”; an NBC sitcom, “Dating the Angels”; the first of four shows called “The Betty White Show”; organize parades – “it means, if a signal will turn red and six cars will line up, I’ll announce them,” she said; and a variety of advertisements and appearances. White even had her own production company, a rarity for a woman at the time.

She also participated in game shows, which eventually led to meeting Ludden, her third husband.

Ludden was the host of “Password”, and White was a panelist during the show’s third week in 1961. The two later worked on the summer film inventory and became good friends. Ludden, a widow, becomes an avid pursuer and actually buys White – a twice divorced man reluctant to marry again – a wedding ring, flirting with her in Los Angeles through trips across the continent from his home in New York.

She finally accepted a year later when he bought her earrings and a stuffed bunny for Easter, the latter gift being an appeal to her love of animals.

“I came to regret that year that I wasted my time saying ‘no’.” I would give anything to have it,” she said of her love affair with Ludden.

They were married for 18 years until Ludden died of cancer in 1981. White never remarried.

For much of the ’60s and ’70s, White worked steadily but quietly, with frequent appearances on talk shows and game shows and occasional guest appearances. (At one point, she was asked to be part of the “Today Show” group.) In the early ’70s, she organized the group “The Pet Set,” which featured celebrities and animals. their.

American actress Mary Tyler Moore (as Mary Richards) (left) supports & # 39;  like & # 39;  signed as she sat at her desk with Betty White (as Sue Ann Nivens) in a scene of & # 39;  The Mary Tyler Moore Show & # 39;  in 1975.

White and Ludden have many friends, including Mary Tyler Moore and her producer husband, Grant Tinker. At the urging of “MTM’s” casting director Ethel Winant, White was cast as Sue Ann Nivens, “The Happy Housewife,” who is sweet and gentle while on the cooking show but is a Hungry man eating out of camera.

Originally meant to be just once – Nivens had an affair with another character’s husband – by the time the episode ended, the chemistry was so strong that White became a regular.

She won two Emmy Awards for this role.

White enjoys working with the cast but comments that “the magic of the performance is the writing. … It’s a great combination.”

White hit it again a decade later when she was cast as Rose in “The Golden Girls,” a 1985-92 show about four high-class women sharing a Miami house.

White recalls the script as “dynamite”. She was originally cast as Blanche, the amorous widow played by Rue McClanahan, but director Jay Sandrich – who worked with White on “MTM” – didn’t want her to repeat herself and suggested Rose.

White recalls the cast that went so well.

“It was like four points on a compass,” she recalls. “That’s why we get along so well.”

The show won several Emmys over the course of seven seasons, including one for White.

Betty White as Rose Nylund in

White has never really caught the eye of the public. After “The Golden Girls” aired, she was still working, whether as an animal rights spokesperson – she was a trustee of the Morris Animal Foundation for more than 40 years – or a guest star on various television shows.

But even she wasn’t prepared for a return to fame after appearing in the 2009 film “The Proposal,” in which she played Ryan Reynolds’ grandmother.

At the 2010 Screen Actors Guild Awards, she received the title of Life Achievement, boldly described by her “Proposal” co-star Sandra Bullock as “a seriously annoying person.”

After receiving a standing ovation, she gave her all.

“Isn’t it nice to see how far an ordinary girl like her can go?” she talks about Bullock.

She then added, “To this day, I’m still at the top. I look out into this audience and I see a lot of famous faces. But what really messes with my mind is, I’m, I I really know many of you, and I’ve worked with quite a few. Maybe,” she added, “there’s been a few. And you know who you are.”

And then she got serious.

“This is the pinnacle of my professional life,” she said. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Years later, she still wonders why she suddenly started attracting attention again.

“I don’t know where the ‘back’ story comes from,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2015. “I’ve been working steadily for the past 70 years!”

But it never stopped for Betty White. There are Snickers ads. The appearance “SNL”. Another series, “Hot in Cleveland,” and appearances on “Community,” “Save Me” (as God) and even “WWF Raw.” She has a Twitter account with over a million followers.

She never took it for granted, remaining the same genuine, slightly mean, attractive woman the public first saw decades ago.

“I’m the luckiest old man on two feet,” she told CNN in 2017. “I can still get a job, at this age. I’ll go to my grave and say ‘I can come in. and read it for tomorrow?'”

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