Betty White, actor and comedian, 1922-2021

If Betty White was a peerless performer, it is not just because at the age of 99.9, she had outlived almost all of her Hollywood contemporaries.

“At my age if you want to connect with old friends you need a Ouija board,” she joked on Saturday Night Live, which she hosted in 2010 at the age of 88, a record for the show. She died on New Year’s Eve, less than three weeks before her highly anticipated centennial birthday. In an industry famed for imposing expiry dates on female talent, White was both an early pioneer and later, a breaker of barriers.

White boasted the longest career of any female performer. Her first entertainment job was in 1939. Dubbed the “first lady of television”, she was the first woman to produce a national TV show, with her sitcom Life with Elizabeth. As an actress, she was also the first woman to star in a sitcom, as well as to star in and produce her own variety show, The Betty White Show. She was the first producer to hire a female director, and the first woman to be nominated for an Emmy award, of which she won seven during her career.

White’s iconic roles on popular sitcoms such as the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls won acclaim for painting fuller pictures of older American women, previously ignored by the entertainment industry. Her saccharine homemaker-next-door on the Mary Tyler More show was unapologetically man-hungry, with mirrors on her bedroom ceiling. Golden Girls portrayed the life of senior women behind closed doors, not just as romantics, but highly sexual beings. White’s distinctive comedic delivery wrapped expertly-timed zingers in sugar, leaving audiences both whiplashed and in hysterics. Her wit was famously raunchy. “People think poor old Betty White, she doesn’t know what she’s saying,” she said in 2018. “Oh, yes, I doooo.”

Her subversive, biting humour worked, in part, because White was also famously sunny and kind. “I’ve always liked the upside better than the downside,” she said. It was a lesson from White’s mother, that “if you look at all the negatives then it spoils all the good stuff. It goes by and it’s gone and you haven’t tasted it,” White said.

After a 2010 turn as a smack-talking backyard footballer in a Snickers commercial, a grassroots Facebook campaign landed her on the live late-night programme SNL. What followed was a meteoric ascendancy back into popular culture. A Hollywood treasure and beloved national grandmother with a wicked wit, she became an icon. But White was mystified when people began to congratulate her on her comeback. As she told a Canadian newspaper in 2010, “I haven’t been away, guys. I’ve been working steadily for the last 63 years.”

White was savvy enough to lean in to longevity as a selling point. She began her SNL monologue, “I’m 88 and a half years old and it’s great to be here for a number of reasons.” She joked that she had bruises on the backs of her legs from assistants on film sets sneaking chairs behind her, concerned about her frailty.

She was also gracious enough to let people eulogise her while she had plenty of living left to do. She was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1995, received a SAG Lifetime achievement award in 2010, and was honoured with a Daytime Emmy Lifetime achievement award in 2015, among other accolades.

White was born in Illinois, in 1922. Her brief first marriage ended when she realised she’d have to live on a chicken farm, and her second collapsed after her husband told her she had to give up her career. She later joked these were “rehearsals” for her 18 year marriage to the “love of her life”, her late third husband Allen Ludden. White was always open about her decision to have a career rather than children, defying the expectation at that time that American women should be homemakers. She is survived by her three stepchildren.

As she aged, White was generous with interviewers who asked for the secrets to both her longevity and her career. A Grey Goose vodka on the rocks before dinner, she’d say. But she could also be serious. “Interest and enthusiasm, really that is the best health benefit in the world,” she said in a 2011 interview. “There are so many things I want to know more about that I’ll never live long enough to do. But it’s something to reach for,” she told a talk-show host.

She’d wave away compliments, and attributed having a vibrant career in her nineties to being unable to turn down new projects. “I have the backbone of a jellyfish,” she said.

When asked if there was still anything she wanted to do but hadn’t done, she would answer, “Robert Redford”.