Betty White

Betty Marion Ludden (née White; January 17, 1922 – December 31, 2021) was an American actress and comedian. A pioneer of early television with a career spanning almost seven decades, she was noted for her vast number of television appearances, acting in sitcoms, sketch comedy, and game shows.

White produced and starred in the series Life with Elizabeth (1953–1955), thus becoming the first woman to produce a sitcom. After moving from radio to television, she became a staple panelist of American game shows such as Password, Match Game, Tattletales, To Tell the Truth, The Hollywood Squares, and The $25,000 Pyramid. Dubbed "the first lady of game shows", she became the first woman to receive the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host for the show Just Men! in 1983. She then became more widely known for her guest and recurring appearances on shows such as The Carol Burnett Show, Mama's Family, The Bold and the Beautiful and Boston Legal.

White's biggest roles include Sue Ann Nivens on the CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1973–1977), Rose Nylund on the NBC sitcom The Golden Girls (1985–1992), and Elka Ostrovsky on the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland (2010–2015). She had a late career resurgence when she starred in the romantic comedy film The Proposal (2009) and hosted Saturday Night Live the following year, garnering her a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series. The 2018 documentary Betty White: First Lady of Television detailed her life and career.

For her lengthy work in radio, television, and film, White twice earned the Guinness World Record for the longest TV career by a female entertainer in both 2014 and 2018. She received various awards and nominations, including seven Emmy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Grammy Award. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1995.

Early life

White was born on January 17, 1922, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She later clarified that "Betty" was her legal name, rather than a shortened version of "Elizabeth" as some people had assumed. She was the only child of housewife Christine Tess (née Cachikis) and lighting company executive Horace Logan White. Her father was from Michigan. White's maternal grandfather was Greek, her paternal grandfather was Danish, both of her grandmothers were Canadians of English descent, and her other ancestry included Welsh. When she was one year old, her family moved to Alhambra, California, and later to Los Angeles during the Great Depression. To make extra money, her father built crystal radios and sold them wherever he could. Since it was the height of the Depression and hardly anyone had a sizable income, he would trade the radios for other goods, which sometimes included dogs.

White was educated in Beverly Hills, where she attended Horace Mann Elementary School and Beverly Hills High School, graduating from the latter in 1939. Her interest in wildlife was sparked by family vacations to the Sierra Nevada. She initially aspired to become a forest ranger, but was unable to do so because women were not allowed to serve as rangers at the time. She instead pursued an interest in writing; she wrote and played the lead in a graduation play at Horace Mann School and discovered her interest in performing. Inspired by her idols Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, she decided to pursue a career as an actress.

One month after White graduated from high school, she and a classmate sang songs from The Merry Widow on an experimental television show, at a time when the medium of television itself was still in development. She found work as a model, and her first professional acting job was at the Bliss Hayden Little Theatre. After the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, she volunteered for the American Women's Voluntary Services. Her assignment included driving a PX truck with military supplies to the Hollywood Hills. She also participated in events for troops before they were deployed overseas. Commenting on her wartime service, she later said that it was "a strange time and out of balance with everything".

Career

1951–1969: Early career and breakthrough

After the war, White made the rounds to movie studios looking for work, but was turned down because she was "not photogenic". She started to look for radio jobs, where being photogenic did not matter. Her first radio jobs included reading commercials and playing bit parts, and sometimes even doing crowd noises. She made about five dollars a show. She would do just about anything, like singing on a show for no pay. She appeared on shows such as Blondie, The Great Gildersleeve, and This Is Your FBI. She was then offered her own radio show, called The Betty White Show. In 1949, she began appearing as co-host with Al Jarvis on his daily live television variety show Hollywood on Television, originally called Make Believe Ballroom, on KFWB and then on KLAC-TV (now KCOP-TV) in Los Angeles.

White began hosting the show by herself in 1952 after Jarvis's departure, spanning five and a half hours of live ad lib television six days per week, over a continuous four-year span. In all of her various variety series over the years, White would sing at least a couple of songs during each broadcast. In 1951, she was nominated for her first Emmy Award as "Best Actress" on television, competing with Judith Anderson, Helen Hayes, and Imogene Coca; the award went to Gertrude Berg. At this point, the award was for body of work, with no shows named in nominations.

The Betty White Show (1952–1954)

From 1952 to 1954, White hosted and produced her own daily talk/variety show, The Betty White Show, first on KLAC-TV and then on NBC (her first television, but second show to feature that title). Like her sitcom, she had creative control over the series, and was able to hire a female director. In a first for American network variety television, her show featured an African-American performer, but the show faced criticism for the inclusion of tap dancer Arthur Duncan as a regular cast member. The criticism followed when NBC expanded the show nationally. Local Southern stations in the Jim Crow era threatened to boycott unless Duncan was removed from the series. In response, White said "I'm sorry. Live with it", and gave Duncan more airtime. Initially a ratings success, the show repeatedly changed time slots and suffered lower viewership. By the end of the year, NBC quietly cancelled the series.

Life with Elizabeth (1953–1955)

In 1952, the same year that she began hosting Hollywood on Television, White co-founded Bandy Productions with writer George Tibbles and Don Fedderson, a producer. The trio worked to create new shows using existing characters from sketches shown on Hollywood on Television. White, Fedderson, and Tibbles created the television comedy Life with Elizabeth, with White portraying the title character. The show was originally a live production on KLAC-TV in 1951, and won White a Los Angeles Emmy Award in 1952. Life with Elizabeth was nationally syndicated from 1953 to 1955, allowing White to become one of the few women in television with full creative control in front of and behind the camera. The show was unusual for a sitcom in the 1950s because it was co-produced and owned by a twenty-eight-year-old woman who still lived with her parents. White said they did not worry about relevance in those days, and that usually the incidents were based on real-life situations that happened to her, Del Moore (who played Alvin), and the writer. White also performed in television advertisements seen on live television in Los Angeles, including a rendition of the "Dr. Ross Dog Food" advertisement at KTLA during the 1950s. She guest-starred on The Millionaire in the 1956 episode "The Virginia Lennart Story", as the owner of a small-town diner who receives an anonymous gift of $1 million.

Following the end of Life with Elizabeth, she appeared as Vicki Angel on the ABC sitcom Date with the Angels from 1957 to 1958. As originally intended, the show, loosely based on the Elmer Rice play Dream Girl, would focus on Vicki's daydreaming tendencies. However, the sponsor was not pleased with the fantasy elements and was pressured to have them eliminated. "I can honestly say that was the only time I have ever wanted to get out of a show", White later said. The sitcom was a critical and rating disaster, but ABC would not allow White to break her contractual agreement and required her to fill the remaining thirteen weeks in their deal. Instead of a retooled version of the sitcom, White rebooted her old talk/variety show, The Betty White Show, which aired until her contract was fulfilled.