![]() However, once she found out that White and McClanahan had swapped roles, she was more interested. Sure enough, McClanahan-who hadn't seen Arthur in seven years but said she loved working with her-remembered Arthur telling her, "'Rue, I don't want to do 'Maude and Vivien Meet Sue Ann Nivens.' Boooorrrring!" It was hard to miss the spiritual connection between Arthur's iconic acerbic feminist Maude Findlay with independent divorcée Dorothy. And McClanahan must have been thought of for Rose because she played Maude's ditzy neighbor Vivien for six years. Meanwhile, McClanahan says she was tasked with trying to convince Arthur, whom she starred with on the All in the Family spin-off Maude, to join The Golden Girls. ![]() The next day they had White read opposite her as Rose. White was originally considered for Blanche, perhaps having been typecast from her two-time Emmy-winning role as the bawdy Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and they wanted McClanahan to play Rose.īut McClanahan, as she remembered in her 2007 memoir My First Five Husbands.and the Ones Who Got Away, thought the role of Blanche was perfect for herself, and she was secretly thrilled when, in the middle of her audition for Rose, the pilot director asked her to switch to Blanche. "We adore each other," White said of McClanahan, whom she affectionately called "Roozie." When NBC was first casting The Golden Girls, McClanahan and White had recently been on Mama's Family together, so they had an ongoing rapport going in to the new project. Still, McClanahan wrote two decades later that it was "awkward" to be pitted against one another year after year, and she sensed Arthur wasn't nuts about losing to White that first year, or herself the next, despite Arthur's bigger paycheck as the most seasoned leading lady of the group.īut when Arthur did win, the first thing she said was, "Let me make this very brief: the four of us want to thank, because we all won." And she went on to list many people involved with the show, including executive producer Paul Junger Witt and creator Susan Harris.Īfter that, the ladies were all bonded in having to grin and bear it when Candice Bergen won the next two years, and again in 1992, for Murphy Brown. "He makes us happy to come to work every day, every week, every year." ![]() There's Estelle Getty, there's me, and there's our secret weapon, the fifth Golden Girl, Terry Hughes," she said with a smile about the male Hughes, who directed 108 episodes of the show and became an executive producer in 1989. There's Bea Arthur and there's Betty White. Rue (who laughed gracefully when presenter Howie Mandel pronounced her name as "McCallahan") gave a longer speech the following year before she addressed the "wonderful group known as the Golden Girls. One of the most delightful things about those repeats, perhaps, is all the new jokes, the ones that meant nothing when you were a kid, but that are either eerily spot-on or shockingly raunchy now. (It's for the best that you had no idea how many sex jokes you were watching with your grandma when you were 8-but it was awesome seeing her laugh that hard.)Īnd though it's been more than 36 years since The Golden Girls premiered in September 1985, and its four pitch-perfect stars are no longer with us, the dynamic relationships that Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan and Betty White brought to the screen live on. It was a show that you made a point of being at home to watch, sitting through commercials and everything, perhaps with one of the special golden-aged ladies in your life by your side. No matter how old you were, whether you were still in your single digits or at a point where you were reminiscing about your 50s, The Golden Girls was-and remains, as evidenced by the people of all ages still tuning into reruns- a sitcom that brought families together. Between 19, there was no more welcoming place to be on a Saturday night than watching Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia talk about life over slices of cheesecake.
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