American actress Betty White died on December 31, 2021 at the age of 99. Lunar character from the series Les Craquantes, she had been successful thanks to this comedy centered on the elderly.
The only daughter of a stay-at-home mom and a lighting company executive father, Betty White was born in the suburbs of Chicago. Following the 1929 crisis, the small family moved to California. Wanting to become a ranger first, Betty fell in love with comedy when she wrote and performed a play during her school years. Then working as a model and for the radio, her career is interrupted by the Second World War in which she voluntarily engages.
From the early 1950s, Betty White began to make series appearances at a more than sustained pace. She took part in 19 episodes of Life with Elizabeth (which she produced through her production company, a first for a woman at the time) and 33 of “Date with the Angels”, two comic series.
In 1962, the young actress played her first character for the cinema in Otto Preminger’s thriller Storm in Washington, that of Senator Bessie Adams alongside big names like Henry Fonda.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, feminist sitcom
In the 1960s, Betty White continued to multiply the roles of greater or lesser importance in various episodes of series. The year 1973, however, marked a turning point in her career when she was chosen to play Sue Ann Nivens in the very feminist sitcom showing for the first time women at work The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
From 1973 to 1977, the actress played a major character in this comic series worn by Mary Tyler Moore, that of the ambitious and charismatic Mary Richards.
The success of “Craquantes”
If, in the 1980s, Betty White illustrated herself in such well-known series as La Croisière amuses, Madame est served and Santa Barbara, it was via Les Craquantes (the first series to focus on elderly people in the roles main) that she finds what will prove to be the role of her life.
She camped in this program, from 1985 to 1992, one of four friends with very different characters who shared the same house in Miami.
Building on this success, and after the end of the series, Betty White continues to appear on the small screen with an always impressive rate, favoring, as usual, comedy programs. In the 1990s, she was Rose Nylund again in The Golden Palace (spin-off of Crisp), Shirley Wallace in Maybe This Time or Mitzi Stiles in “Un homme à femmes”.
Return to cinema and other successful series
On the cinema side, Betty White is among others in the cast of the action film Pluie d’enfer (1998) worn by Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater, the horror film Lake Placid (2000), the comedy Bronx à Bel Air (2003 ) and the romantic comedy The Proposition (2009) in which she plays Ryan Reynolds’ grandmother. In the 2000s, she even got a taste of the legal genre with the Boston Justice series and joined the famous soap Love, Glory and Beauty for 23 episodes.
Tireless, Betty White is in the 2010s one of the four main characters of the comedy series Hot in Cleveland. This is Elka Ostrovsky, the caretaker of an outspoken building with whom the characters held by Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick are forced to cohabit …
The end of the series in 2015 does not prevent the actress from continuing to work. She thus doubles an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants then plays Doctor Beth Mayer in two episodes of Bones.
A key figure on the American small screen with a career as long as it is dense, Betty White has received numerous awards, as evidenced by her eight Emmy Awards, her three American Comedy Awards, her three Screen Actors Guild and her Grammy. In 1995, she was also entitled to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She died at the age of 99 on December 31, 2021, a few days before the broadcast of a documentary tribute to her career, which was scheduled to celebrate her 100 years.