Betty White wanted to be a forest ranger before television existed
Betty White dreamed of becoming a forest ranger, but women were not allowed the job. Instead, a month after finishing high school in 1939, she sang on an experimental broadcast when television was barely invented, beginning a screen career so long that Guinness twice named it the longest of any female entertainer.
She was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on January 17, 1922, and moved to California as a baby. Betty was her legal name, not a short form of Elizabeth. During the Depression her father built crystal radios and, with cash scarce, often traded them for other goods, sometimes dogs. Family holidays in the Sierra Nevada gave her a lifelong love of animals. In the Second World War she volunteered with a women's service, driving a supply truck into the Hollywood Hills.
Film studios turned her down as not photogenic, so she took radio work, reading ads and even producing crowd noises for about five dollars a show. In 1949 she became co-host of Hollywood on Television, a live Los Angeles programme; once she took it over alone, it ran five and a half hours a day, six days a week, largely unscripted. In 1952 she co-founded a production company, and its sitcom Life with Elizabeth, syndicated from 1953 to 1955, made her the first woman to produce a sitcom, while she was still living with her parents.
Her own daily show on NBC hired a female director and, unusually for network variety television, featured a Black performer, the tap dancer Arthur Duncan. When Southern stations threatened a boycott unless he was dropped, White refused and gave him more airtime. She became a fixture of game shows, marrying Password host Allen Ludden in 1963, and turned down an anchor post on Today because she would not move to New York; the job went to Barbara Walters.
Her best-known roles came later: the man-hungry Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls and Elka on Hot in Cleveland. After The Proposal in 2009, she hosted Saturday Night Live and won an Emmy for it. She died on December 31, 2021.
Source: Betty White
