2. When casting the show, Lee Grant was first offered the role of Dorothy, but she refused to play a woman old enough to have grandchildren. Even though the original production notes describing Dorothy listed her as “a Bea Arthur type,” it took some time before the producers got the bright idea of actually offering the part to actress Beatrice Arthur.
3. Bea Arthur (Dorothy) was actually a year older than the actress who portrayed her mother on the show.
4. When Rue McClanahan and Betty White were first hired for the series, it was with the intent of Betty playing man-hungry Blanche, and Rue the naïve Rose. However, both actresses felt that those roles were too similar to characters they’d recently played: Rue’s Vivian on Maude and Betty’s Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. They asked the producers if they could switch roles, and after the first table reading it was agreed that the change was a brilliant idea.
5. The pilot episode featured a flamboyantly gay cook named Coco (played by Charles Levin) who worked for the Girls. By the time the series was picked up, though, his part had been eliminated for two reasons: the writers noted that in many of the proposed future scripts the main interaction between the women occurred in the kitchen while preparing and eating food, and a separate cook would distract from that camaraderie and the character of Sophia had originally been planned as an occasional guest star, but Estelle Getty had tested so strongly with preview audiences that the producers quickly made Sophia a regular character and chief chef which made Coco superfluous.
6. A 2005 study by Simmons Market Research determined that more gays and lesbians watched The Golden Girls than the general population in any given week. The show did touch on homosexuality a few times: Blanche’s brother came out as gay in one episode and Dorothy’s college friend was a lesbian.
7. Estelle Getty was 47 years old before she first appeared on stage, so it was no wonder that she felt intimidated by her veteran co-workers. Since Sophia was a last-minute addition as a regular character, who would’ve thought that she would ultimately become the most popular Golden Girl? Part of her charm was the stroke that had damaged the part of her brain that censored her speech, which allowed the writers to give her some classic cutting lines.
8. As time went on, Estelle had some odd medical problems that ultimately led to a misdiagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. Unfortunately, the medications she was given in error further exacerbated the problem. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that she was finally diagnosed as suffering from Lewy Body Dementia.
9. A large part of the Golden Girls’ appeal was that they were all women over age 50 who were still actively working, volunteering in the community, and even dating and having sex. They showed the world that menopause didn’t automatically equal resigning oneself to knitting afghans and baking cookies.
Enjoy some class quotes at IMDB
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