Which golden girls are still alive 2017

Premiering in , The Golden Girls was an instant smash, attracting a diverse audience for a then-novel concept — depicting the lives of four older women sharing friendship, a home and a lot of cheesecake. In the decades since, the award-winning series starring Betty White , Bea Arthur , Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty has found new generations of fans, thanks to frequent reruns and streaming platforms.

Check out 10 facts you may not know about the golden girls and the actresses who so memorably played them:. The pair adlibbed a bit about the upcoming cop show Miami Vice , changing the concept to the idea of retirees playing cards together in a Florida retirement community in a show called, Miami Nice.

When the spoof impressed the audience, it sparked the idea for a series with NBC execs, and in its early stages of development, it kept the Miami Nice working title before finally being changed to The Golden Girls.

A decade before The Golden Girls premiered, Arthur starred in Maude , a spinoff from All in the Family , in which she played the anti-Archie Bunker, a politically liberal feminist.

The show made headlines for its embrace of controversial topics, including an episode in which Maude has an abortion after discovering she is pregnant in her late 40s. McClanahan played the younger sister of star Vicki Lawrence, while White played her oldest child.

Stage and screen actress Elaine Stritch auditioned for the part but later admitted that she blew her audition by adlibbing an obscenity. It was the fear of typecasting that also impacted the roles of Rose Nylund and Blanche Deveraux. In a interview with the Paley Center, White admitted that McClanahan had done much more with the role of Blanche than she ever could have.

The pilot episode featured a fourth character, a gay chef who worked for Blanche named Coco Levin. Sophia was originally intended to be a semi-recurring character, but producers were impressed enough with the dynamic between the four actresses, that they dropped Coco from the series.

Although Getty played the oldest of the women, she was actually a year younger than her on-screen daughter. According to a issue of Orange Coast Magazine , it took makeup artists three hours to transform Getty into her character — a job made even harder after Getty underwent a facelift in between seasons one and two.

Over the course of its run, a number of well-known Hollywood actors appeared on the show, including Mickey Rooney, Rita Moreno , Jerry Orbach , Debbie Reynolds and more. Legendary comedian Bob Hope played himself in one episode, as did Jeopardy!

Burt Reynolds , Julio Iglesias and even Sonny Bono made appearances as themselves as romantic interests of the women. George Clooney , who appeared on a number of classic '80s shows before he hit the big time on ER , appeared in one episode as a police officer. Photo by Alice S. McClanahan and White developed a bond during the series, passing the time on-set playing word games and creating riddles.

But Arthur's relationship with White was much frostier. It was my positive attitude — and that made Bea mad sometimes. Sometimes if I was happy, she'd be furious!

It was almost like Betty became her nemesis, someone she could always roll her eyes about at work. Queen Mother was such a fan of the show that she requested that they fly to London in November to perform as part of a royal variety show. The Queen was lovely. We were told not to address her unless we were addressed. She was up in a box and she came down on stage after with Princess Anne. There was brainy Dorothy, flirtatious Blanche, naive Rose who hailed from the fictional St. Olaf, Minn.

All of them were bitingly funny and overtly sexual, a rare depiction of women of a certain age, both then and now.

Ian Thielke, 38, of Columbia Heights, Minn. Lucy Walbruch of Savage, Minn. By having empathetic, older women sharing their views, hot-button issues became relatable to diverse swaths of viewers, Colucci said.

During the Reagan era, when a family meant dad, mom and the kids, people who lived outside of the norm saw themselves reflected on a show in which men consistently played second fiddle to independent, single women, Powell said. For gays and lesbians, especially, the show served as a kind of validation that family could be nontraditional, and chosen. Their frustration mirrored that of same-sex partners at the height of the AIDS epidemic who could not visit their loved ones in hospitals.

But the writers went further, pushing the envelope for sitcom subject matter into some of the biggest controversies of the s.