Betty Marion White Ludden (January 17, 1922 – December 31, 2021) was an American actress and comedian. 

A pioneer of early television, with a career spanning eight decades, White was noted for her vast work in the entertainment industry. She was among the first women to exert control in front of and behind the camera and the first woman to produce a sitcom (Life with Elizabeth), which contributed to her being named honorary Mayor of Hollywood in 1955.

After making the transition to television from radio, White became a staple panelist of American game shows, including Password, Match Game, Tattletales, To Tell the Truth, The Hollywood Squares, and The $25,000 Pyramid; dubbed "the first lady of game shows", White became the first woman to receive the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host for the show Just Men! in 1983. She was also known for her appearances on The Bold and the Beautiful, Boston Legal, The Carol Burnett Show, and Saturday Night Live. Her most notable 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).

White worked longer in television than anyone else in that medium, earning her a Guinness World Record in 2018. White received eight Emmy Awards in various categories, three American Comedy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Grammy Award. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and was a 1985 Television Hall of Fame inductee.

Early life

Betty Marion White was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on January 17, 1922. She stated that Betty was her legal name and not a shortened version of Elizabeth. She was the only child of Christine Tess (née Cachikis; 1899–1985), a homemaker, and Horace Logan White (1899–1963), a lighting company executive. Her paternal grandfather was Danish and her maternal grandfather was Greek, with her other roots being English and Welsh (both of her grandmothers were Canadians).

White's family moved to Alhambra, California, in 1923 when she was a little over a year old, 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 in exchange for other goods, including dogs on some occasions.

White attended the Beverly Hills Unified School District in Beverly Hills, and Beverly Hills High School, graduating in 1939. Her interest in wildlife was sparked by family vacations to the Sierra Nevada. She initially aspired to a career as a forest ranger, but was unable to accomplish this because women were not allowed to serve as rangers at that time. Instead, White 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.

White's earliest glimpse in entertainment came when she made a guest call on a radio program in 1930 when she was eight years old and appeared on an episode of a radio program called Empire Builders which was first broadcast on December 22 that year. Three months after her high school graduation, when she and a classmate sang songs from The Merry Widow on an experimental television show. White found work modeling, and her first professional acting job was at the Bliss Hayden Little Theatre. When World War II broke out, she put her career on hold and volunteered for the American Women's Voluntary Services. Her assignment included the transportation of military supplies through California. She also participated in events for troops before they were deployed overseas.

Career

Early work

After the war, White made rounds to movie studios looking for work, but was always turned down because she was "not photogenic". So then 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 or making an appearance on the local game show. 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 on 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 such legendary stars as Judith Anderson, Helen Hayes, and Imogene Coca, but the award went to Gertrude Berg.

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 KCOP-TV in 1951, and won White a Los Angeles Emmy Award in 1952.

Life with Elizabeth was nationally syndicated from 1952 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, the actor who played Alvin, and the writer.

White also performed in television advertisement 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 episode "The Virginia Lennart Story", as the owner of a small town diner that received an anonymous gift of $1,000,000, in 1956.

In 1954, White hosted and produced her own daily talk/variety show, The Betty White Show, on NBC (her second show to feature that title). Like her sitcom, she had creative control over the series, and was able to hire a female director. The show faced criticism for the inclusion of Arthur Duncan, an African-American performer, as a regular cast member. The criticism followed when NBC expanded the show nationally. Local Southern stations 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.

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 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 ratings disaster, but ABC wouldn't allow White out of 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."

In July 1959, White made her professional stage debut in a week-long production of the play, Third Best Sport, at the Ephrata Legion Star Playhouse in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

Personal life

Religion

White was a Christian. She attended the Unity Church.

Family

While volunteering with the American Women's Voluntary Services, White met her first husband Dick Barker, a United States Army Air Forces aircraft pilot. After the war, the couple married and moved to Ohio where Barker owned a chicken farm. The marriage ended in divorce within the year.

In 1947, she married Lane Allen, a Hollywood talent agent.

On June 14, 1963, White married television host and personality Allen Ludden, whom she had met on his game show Password as a celebrity guest in 1961, and her legal name was changed to Betty White Ludden. He proposed to White at least twice before she accepted. The couple appeared together in an episode of The Odd Couple featuring Felix's and Oscar's appearance on Password. Ludden appeared as a guest panelist on Match Game, with White sitting in the audience. (She was prompted to criticize one of Ludden's wrong answers on camera during an episode of Match Game '74.)

Allen Ludden died from stomach cancer on June 9, 1981, in Los Angeles. While they had no children together, she was a stepmother to three of his children from his first marriage to Margaret McGloin Ludden, who died of cancer in 1961. White decided not to remarry, since Ludden's death. In an interview with Larry King, when asked whether she would remarry, she replied by saying "Once you've had the best, who needs the rest?" When asked by James Lipton on Inside The Actor's Studio that should Heaven exist, what would she like God to say to her when she walked through the Pearly gates, White replied: "Hello Betty. Here's Allen."

Friendships Bea Arthur

White had a strained relationship with her The Golden Girls co-star Bea Arthur on and off the set of their television show, commenting that Arthur "was not that fond of me" and that "she found me a pain in the neck sometimes. It was my positive attitude – and that made Bea mad sometimes. Sometimes if I was happy, she'd be furious." After Arthur's death in 2009, White said, "I knew it would hurt, I just didn't know it would hurt this much." Despite their differences, The Golden Girls was a positive experience for both actresses and they had great mutual respect for the show, their roles, and the achievements made as an ensemble cast. Arthur would often insist on waiting to leave for lunch until all four (she and White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty) had finished their work and could leave together.

Lucille Ball

White first met Lucille Ball while working on the short-lived sitcom Date With the Angels, which was filmed on The Culver Studios lot where I Love Lucy was also filmed. The two quickly struck up a friendship over their accomplishments in taking on the male dominated television business of the '50s. They relied on one another through divorce, illness, personal loss, and even competed against one another on various game shows.

Liberace

In a 2011 interview, White said that she always knew her close friend Liberace was gay and that she sometimes accompanied him to premieres. A supporter of gay rights, White said that "If a couple has been together all that time – and there are gay relationships that are more solid than some heterosexual ones – I think it's fine if they want to get married. I don't know how people can get so anti-something. Mind your own business, take care of your affairs, and don't worry about other people so much".

Mary Tyler Moore

Mary Tyler Moore and her husband Grant Tinker were close friends with White and Ludden. When Valerie Harper left The Mary Tyler Moore Show, producers felt the show needed another female character, and so created Sue Ann Nivens. Nivens was described as an "icky sweet Betty White type." In a 2010 The Interviews: An Oral History of Television interview, Moore explained that producers, aware of Moore and White's friendship, were initially hesitant to audition White for the role, for fear that if she hadn't been right, it would create awkwardness between the two.

John Steinbeck

In her 2011 book If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't), White writes about her friendship with famed author John Steinbeck. White's husband Allen Ludden attended the same school as Steinbeck's wife Elaine Anderson Steinbeck. The couples became close friends, and Steinbeck gave an early draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to Ludden for his birthday.

Death

White died of natural causes at her home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles on the morning of December 31, 2021, seventeen days before what would have been her 100th birthday.

US President Joe Biden released a statement upon her death, describing her as a "lovely lady" and a "cultural icon who will be sorely missed". Many celebrities, including Ryan Reynolds, Sandra Bullock, Ellen DeGeneres, Seth Meyers, Conan O'Brien, Bob Iger, Paul Feig and Kathy Griffin also paid tribute to the late actress on Twitter.

Animal welfare work

White was a pet enthusiast and animal welfare advocate, who worked organizations including the Los Angeles Zoo Commission, The Morris Animal Foundation, African Wildlife Foundation, and Actors & Others for Animals. Her interest in animal welfare began in the early 1970s while she was producing and hosting the syndicated series The Pet Set, which spotlighted celebrities and their pets.

As of 2009, White was the president emerita of the Morris Animal Foundation, where she served as a trustee of the organization beginning in 1971. She was a member of the board of directors of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association since 1974. Additionally, White served the association as a Zoo Commissioner for eight years.

According to the Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Garden's ZooScape member newsletter, White hosted "History on Film" from 2000 to 2002. White donated nearly $100,000 to the zoo in the month of April 2008 alone.

Betty White served as a presenter at the 2011 American Humane Hero Dog Awards ceremony at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on October 1, 2011, in Los Angeles.

In September 2011, White teamed up with English singer Luciana to produce a remix of her song "I'm Still Hot". The song was released digitally on September 22 and the video later premiered on October 6. It was made for a campaign for a life settlement program, The Lifeline. White served as a judge alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Wendy Diamond for the American Humane's Hero Dog Awards airing on the Hallmark Channel on November 8, 2011.