Getty of ‘Golden Girls’ dies
Published 2:00 pm Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Estelle Getty, an actress best remembered for her Emmy Award-winning role on “The Golden Girls” as an abrasive octogenarian robbed of her “tact cells” after a stroke, died July 22 at her home in Los Angeles. She had dementia and was 84.
“The Golden Girls,” a sitcom about senior citizens who share a Florida home, aired on NBC from 1985 to 1992. It twice won Emmy Awards for best comedy and has endured in syndication.
Getty was 61 when she portrayed Sophia through white wig, large glasses and dowdy clothing. She was an important member of the show’s acting quartet that also featured Bea Arthur as her dominating daughter.
The other cast members were Betty White as a ditzy widow and Rue McClanahan as an oversexed Southern belle who once insisted she treated her body like a temple.
“Yeah,” said Getty as Sophia, “open to everyone, day or night.”
Getty became an instant television star because of “The Golden Girls” after decades in near-obscurity as a working actress hovering, as she put it, “somewhere under five feet” and “somewhere under 90 pounds.”
She had first attracted notice as Harvey Fierstein’s overbearing Jewish mom, Mrs. Beckoff, in “Torch Song Trilogy” (1982), which ran three years on Broadway despite mixed reviews. She won the 1985 Helen Hayes Award for outstanding supporting performer in a touring production.
That stage role brought her to the attention of NBC, which cast her in “The Golden Girls,” a show the network began to counteract objections that its “Miami Vice” police drama portrayed South Florida as overly violent. “The Golden Girls” was subsequently dubbed “Miami Nice.”
The comedy brought Getty the 1988 Emmy for best supporting actress in a comedy series — she was nominated seven times — as well as a 1986 Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a comedy or musical TV series.
As a result, she won many offers to interpret feisty or eccentric mothers onscreen. The parts were of varying quality but included mother to Cher (“Mask,” 1985), Barry Manilow (“Copacabana,” 1985) and Sylvester Stallone (“Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot,” 1992).
She said she had no problem playing people much older than her actual age. “I really don’t have an actor’s ego,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1986. “I never wanted ‘stardom.’ I think it’s because I was a fat, funny-looking kid. It’s not that I constantly looked in the mirror and saw the ravages of beauty. There was no beauty to ravage.”
Estelle Scher was born July 25, 1923, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Polish-Jewish immigrants. In 1947, she married Arthur Gettleman, who was in the retail glass business.
Her husband died in 2004. She is survived by her their two sons, Barry Gettleman of Miami and Carl Gettleman of Santa Monica, Calif.; a brother; and a sister.
Getty said she first became interested in performing after her father took her to a student performance at the New York Academy of Music. At 18, she began working as a waitress and stand-up comic at Borscht Belt hotels in upstate New York.
“In those days it was hard to find material if you were a woman,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “You could make fun of yourself for being fat or your mother-in-law. I used to tell jokes about shopping. I was okay.”
During the next several decades, she acted in settlement houses and community theaters. She told the Toronto Star she sometimes worked two jobs to support her stage interests. “And I knew I could be seduced by success in another field,” she said in 1986, “so I’d say, ‘Don’t promote me, please.’ I just took enough so I could continue.”
She said she twice flunked her “Golden Girls” audition because she appeared too young. Bea Arthur, who played her daughter, was in fact a year older than Ms. Getty.
At the third test, she pulled aside an NBC makeup artist and said, “To you this is just a job. To me it’s my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80. But I don’t want to put any pressure on you.”
She won the job.
She reprised her “Golden Girls” character in several television series, including a short-lived sequel, “The Golden Palace” (1992). On screen, her parts included the voice of Grandma Estelle Little in “Stuart Little” (1999).
She wrote a memoir, with help from Steve Delsohn, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now — So What?” (1988).
