A LEGACY THAT GOES BEYOND THE SCREEN: BETTY WHITE
DENIZ AKKAYA
With a life that spanned nearly a century — including more than eight decades in show business — it’s impossible to adequately represent Betty White’s legacy in a single tribute.
Betty White was one of the few remaining things everyone could agree on, and now that she’s gone many are looking back at her incredible career. The six-time Emmy winner has been working in show business consistently for more than 75 years, and hers is the longest television career of any female entertainer in history.
White launched her TV career in daytime talk shows when the medium was still in its infancy and endured well into the age of cable and streaming. Her combination of sweetness and edginess gave life to a roster of quirky characters in shows from the sitcom “Life With Elizabeth” in the early 1950s to oddball Rose Nylund in “The Golden Girls” in the ’80s to “Boston Legal,” which ran from 2004 to 2008.
But it was in 2010 that White’s stardom erupted as never before. In a Snickers commercial that premiered during that year’s Super Bowl broadcast, she impersonated a jacked dude getting tackled during a backlot football game. “Mike, you’re playing like Betty White out there,” jeered one of his chums. White, flat on the ground and covered in mud, fired back, “That’s not what your girlfriend said!” This led to a Facebook campaign backed by nearly 500,000 fans for her to host Saturday Night Live. And, of course, she did host the Saturday Night Live which got her 7th Emmy Award and made her the oldest person ever (88) to host the show.
White helped to normalize and destigmatize the idea that a woman didn’t have to meet a man, get pregnant, and raise a family in order to be considered successful. She took that one step further by openly discussing it as a conscious choice in interviews as early as the 1950s. For years, she provided a highly visible example of a woman who led a successful and fulfilling life without starting a family. And, as she would later point out, what happens in a person’s private life is none of our business anyway.
She is ‘TV’s original trailblazing feminist and a dedicated activist of animal rights. Additionally, Betty is a long-time supporter of the LGBTQIA+ community. She is highlighted on the GLAAD website as an ally for equality. Betty was the one thing that everyone, I mean EVERYONE, loved and respected.
In a society that constantly overlooks and misunderstands old age, the fact that Betty continued to work and remained a relevant public figure well into her late 90s was both an act of resilience and resistance. After all, we don’t have any reason to expect anything less from her anyways.
