Estelle Getty

The tart-tongued actress who brightened The Golden Girls

Estelle Getty

1923–2008

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“I’ve played mothers to heroes and mothers to zeroes,” Estelle Getty once wrote. “I’ve played Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Southern mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. I’ve played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun.” But the most memorable mother Getty played was the wisecracking Sophia Petrillo on the hit sitcom The Golden Girls, from 1985 to 1992, for which she won a Golden Globe and an Emmy.

Her success was a long time coming, said The New York Sun. Born Estelle Scheer on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Polish immigrants, Getty “studied dance and elocution at a settlement house for 25 cents a lesson. As a teenager she tried to make a go of it as a comedienne at Catskills hotels, but succeeded mainly at being a waitress.” After that, she supported herself as a secretary, trying out for parts during lunch breaks. For 30 years she worked off-Broadway, in community theater, and in small TV roles before breaking through in 1982 in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy. Two years later, Getty got her part in Golden Girls—“shortly after turning down a job that called for her to audition in a chicken suit.”

As Sophia, the tiny (4-foot-11) Getty played the outspoken mother of Bea Arthur, who lived in Miami with two other older women, played by Rue McLanahan and Betty White, said the London Independent. With a white wig and makeup to make her look 20 years older, Getty was soon stealing the show with her wacky one-liners. When McLanahan’s oversexed Blanche wailed, for instance, that her life was an open book, Getty shot back, “Your life is an open blouse.” Offscreen, she little resembled her fictional alter ego. “I would like to be as sure and magnanimous and feisty and strong and indomitable as she is,” Getty said.

Getty also had small roles in such movies as Mask and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and again played Sophia in The Golden Palace, a short-lived Golden Girls spin-off. She is survived by two sons, a brother, and a sister.