#MOST RECENT PICTURE OF BETTY WHITE TV#

But they knew who Betty White was, thanks not just to her ubiquity as an Internet meme source (barely into her fifties on MTM, White reinvented herself as an adorably horny woman with no filter, and the brand stuck) but also because White herself was just so damned charming, and such an unbeatable talk-show guest, that you couldn’t help loving her. Two successive generations of Americans now have zero experience watching television programs on the boxlike sets that were commonplace when White’s renown was at its peak.

Betty White was analog and digital, black-and-white and 8K OLED, Truman and Biden. She was television when television became one of a zillion things we could watch on little combination pocket computer-phones. She was television when the box turned into a flat panel and became high-def. She was television when television as we knew it was lights and vacuum tubes in a box. She won five Emmys for her performances and was nominated for 16 more, most recently in 2011, for Hot in Cleveland.

#MOST RECENT PICTURE OF BETTY WHITE TV#

An actor, singer, dancer, talk and game show host, and producer whose costars ranged from Eddie Albert to Ryan Reynolds, White was a big name on TV in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, aughts, and beyond. White was known as The First Lady of Television (the title of a documentary about her career) not just because of her easygoing authority and stealthy influence but because she was the first woman to do all sorts of things in a medium where men held most of the power. No matter what happened, Betty White found a place for herself. White’s career began to hit its peak in 1973 when she was hired as a regular on The Mary Tyler Moore Show at 51, and it continued through a stint on Golden Girls in the 1980s and a seemingly endless sunset period that established her as a sly, sunny grandma who loved to work just a little bit blue. After she glided past 40, a milestone that often marked the beginning of the end of a woman’s stardom, her fame only grew.

She started one of the first significant woman-owned production companies, maintaining creative control over its product. White is thought to be the first woman to host a talk show solo. She was preceded in death by TV broadcasting as millions knew it, and then outlived it, adapting to a transformed entertainment landscape more gracefully than the medium that she embodied. Photo: ABC Photo Archives/Disney via Getty Imagesīetty White, the most durable television star of all time and one of the most beloved and groundbreaking, died just short of her hundredth birthday.

Most recent picture of betty white