The iconic Golden Girls TV show ran for seven seasons, from 1985 to 1992. Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty appeared in a total of 180 episodes, each lasting for half an hour. Long before Sex and the city was even an idea, the quartet has been dealing with issues concerning male-female relationships. Dororthy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia all lived together in a house in Florida and the show followed their mature lives and their escapades with men.
Despite the show’s popularity and its huge number of fans, there are still some facts that remain relatively unknown to the general public. For instance, Betty White was originally cast as Blanche. But due to her previous role of Sue Ann Nivens, the “neighborhood nymphomaniac,” in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, producers feared that it would confuse the audience, so they gave her the role of Rose.
Rue McClanahan had a clause in her contract that specified that all specially made clothes Blanche wore in the show would be hers to keep. She planned to one day share them with the fans, together with a large number of other memorabilia she collected over the years. Unfortunately, she passed away in 2010, without fulfilling her dream, so Mark LaRue, a close family friend, took it upon himself to do it.
Estelle Getty suffered from a serious case of stage fright. She only got into acting when she was 55 and started shooting golden Girls at the age of 62. “I’m afraid, you know? I live with fear as a constant companion. Can I do this week after week? Am I good enough? Will I be able to pull it off this week? Will I be able to fool them again?” she once said. “Every Friday I’m scared out of my wits, you know? I keep thinking, I don’t believe that I’m in this. Wait till they find out that I can’t do it.”
Loyal fans of the show were quick to notice that the kitchen table, often used in the show, had only three chairs. Terry Hughes, the director of the show, revealed the mystery behind it. “There was a technical reason for that because somebody would have had to sit with their back to the camera.”
He also said this about the sitting arrangement: “It was a bit like the school bus. You take a seat and you have that seat for the rest of your life. Dorothy was always in the middle, and Rose and Blanche would switch sides depending on who had to leave the room the quickest.”
“We got lots of letters from teenage girls who were unhappy at home and wanted to move in with us. They thought it was real life,” McClanahan said about their fan mail, “The appeal of these four characters was their warmth and friendship and the fact that we stuck together through thick and thin.”
The girls often joked that they were nothing like their characters. As McClanahan once said: “None of us was like any of our characters. People ask me if I am like Blanche and my standard answer is, ‘Get serious! Look at the facts, Blanche is a man-crazy, glamorous, extremely sexy, successful with men Southern belle from Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m not from Atlanta!”
Of course, off camera not everything was golden. In fact, McClanahan often complained about Bea Arthur’s behavior: “Bea [Arthur] and I didn’t have a lot of relationship going on. Bea is a very, very eccentric woman. She wouldn’t go to lunch [with me] unless Betty [White] would go with her. She was very dependent on keeping everything as it always had been, and I was anything but that.” Fortunately, their relationship on camera was flawless, despite their differences.
The show was considered an ideal opportunity for young actors to get their start in Hollywood, making the guest list quite impressive, including George Clooney, Jeffrey Tambor, Mario Lopez, Mickey Rooney, Dick Van Dyke, Debbie Reynolds, Jerry Orbach, Fred Willard, Quentin Tarantino, and Burt Reynolds.
Unfortunately, today only one of the Golden Girls is still alive. The other three have gone that “Miami retirement in the sky”. Sophia (Estelle Getty) died in 2008, followed by Dorothy (Bea Arthur) a year later. Blanche (Rue McClanahan) joined them in 2010. But Betty White (Rose) is still alive and kicking, working tirelessly at the age of 95. She even got to make out with Brad Cooper during the SNL sketch. Keep it up, Rose.
Source: thelist.com
