Estelle Getty, 84, ‘Golden Girl’ Had Avant-Garde Career

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Note: Correction appended.

Estelle Getty, who died yesterday at 84, played the tiny, tart-tongued octogenarian Sophia on TV’s “Golden Girls” for seven seasons starting in 1985.

Despite being two decades younger than the role, the job represented for Getty the culmination of decades of toiling in near obscurity in avant-garde New York productions, mostly far off Broadway.

It was reprising one of those roles — as the Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy” — that brought her fame in the form of a 1982 Drama Desk Award and a shot at the television big time in the form of an audition. She said she nearly failed it for being too young, but prevailed on her third try when she showed up in costume — a baggy dress she’d bought at a thrift store.

It wasn’t the first time she gave her career a determined kick in the pants. While an audience member at La MaMa in 1978, watching what would become “Torch Song Trilogy,” Getty became friendly with Mr. Fierstein.

“She forced me to write the last part,” Mr. Fierstein said in an interview yesterday. She would hit me and say why don’t you write a part for a mother? So I finally did write the third act.”

That’s the one where Getty, still hoping for her son’s conversion to heterosexuality, flies in from Miami to clean his house and finds him living with two men — one a teenage waif he says he wants to adopt. “Three men, two bedrooms,” Getty sniffs.

The play moved to Broadway in 1982, where it won a Tony for best new play. It was in 1984 while touring with the road company in Los Angeles that Getty snagged her “Golden Girls” role — shortly after turning down a job that called for her to audition in a chicken suit. Her diminutive figure — several inches under five feet — had made snagging bigger parts difficult.

“If a director stood up I sat down, and if he sat down I stood up,” she once said.

The daughter of Polish immigrants who grew up “comfortable” on the Lower East Side, Getty was exposed to vaudeville as a small child and studied dance and elocution at a settlement house for 25 cents a lesson. She attended Seward Park High School. As a teenager, she tried to make a go of it as a comedienne at Catskills Hotels, but succeeded mainly at being a waitress.

“I used to tell jokes about shopping,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “I was okay.” She didn’t like the self-deprecatory jokes that seemed to be expected of women in those days. “I remember one that made me laugh,” she said. “Your father said if you lie down with dogs, you pick up fleas. If you lie down with a policeman, I’ll beat the hell out of you!”

After marrying Arthur Gettleman in 1947 — her stage name was a shortened version of his name — the couple moved to Long Island, where she helped found a theater group in Fresh Meadows. While her husband took over her father’s glass business, she had two sons and helped support the family working at secretarial jobs.

“I knew I could be seduced by success in another field, so I’d say ‘Don’t promote me please,'” she told the Associated Press.

It was only with “Torch Song Trilogy” that she began making a living from theater. Soon afterwards, she was cast in “Tootsie” (1982), the first of a string of small film roles.

“I have been everybody’s mother but Attila the Hun,” she once said. Her on-screen children included Cher (“Mask” [1985]), Barry Manilow (“Copacabana” [1985]), and Sylvester Stallone (“Stop! Or My Mother Will Shoot” [1992]).

At “Golden Girls” she found national recognition. The brash Sicilian one-liners — “You’re life’s an open blouse” she once told Rue McClanahan — were not unlike her own Yiddishkeit humor. The found women stars, rounded out by Betty White and Bea Arthur, were formed by a slick production team as four women of a certain age living together. Getty was proud that the show seemed to usher in less stereotyped attitudes towards older people.

Her career, she once told Joan Rivers on “The Tonight Show” was “like having a change-of-life baby.” Getty put her earthy wisdom on further display in an autobiographical book, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now … So What?” (1988).

She kept working after “Golden Girls” was canceled in 1992. She produced an exercise video and appeared in TV movies. One of her last performances was voicing a duck in an animated Harvey Fierstein production, “The Sissy Duckling” for HBO.

Recalling her impact on his life yesterday, Mr. Fierstein said, “As far as I’m concerned it’s the difference between a little career and the career I had.”

In recent years, Getty suffered from dementia. The actress Betty White, who remained a friend, described her condition as “like a curtain wafting in and out.”

Estelle Getty

Born Estelle Scher on July 25, 1924, in New York; died July 22 at her home in Hollywood; survived by her sons, Carl Gettleman and Barry Gettleman; her husband died in 1998.


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