Since our audience is mostly interested in the sexy exploits of young starlets, I hesitate to follow news on the death of Golden Girls’ Estelle Getty with this one but it’s interesting and, certainly, cheerier.
OTB Sports editor Bill Jempty sent word that Debbie Reynolds‘ boat sank. So what, you say? She once played the lead in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
Movie star Debbie Reynolds, who played the lead role in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” bought a boat a few months ago. It sank on Friday in Green Cove Springs.
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Todd Fisher, Reynolds’ son, said “Jean Mary” was featured on television as one of the world’s top 10 finest houseboats. Fisher said he’s seen the salvaged boat from a live video feed.
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John Hall, vice president of Mobro Marine in Green Cove Springs, said his team used a 450-ton crane to salvage the boat. Part of the boat was sitting in eight feet of water while docked at Reynolds Park Yacht Center a mile away. Hall said deterioration on the side of the 75-foot-long boat must have been overlooked when the boat was surveyed. That created a hole big enough to sink it in about 10 minutes.
When lifting the boat out of the water, Hall said, his crew was careful not to damage it any further. “It’s decked out with super-expensive stuff,” he said, adding that it is not uncommon for boats to sink.
Boats sink? Who knew.
Estelle Getty, best known for playing Sophia on TV’s “The Golden Girls,” has died. She was 84.
Getty, who suffered from advanced dementia, died at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday at her Hollywood Boulevard home, said her son, Carl Gettleman of Santa Monica.
“She was loved throughout the world in six continents, and if they loved sitcoms in Antarctica she would have been loved on seven continents,” her son said. “She was one of the most talented comedic actresses who ever lived.”
“The Golden Girls,” featuring four female retirees sharing a house in Miami, grew out of NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff’s belief that television was ignoring its older viewers. Three of its stars had already appeared in previous series: Bea Arthur in “Maude,” Betty White in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Rue McClanahan in “Mama’s Family.” The last character to be cast was Sophia Petrillo, the feisty 80-something mother of Arthur’s character.
“Our mother-daughter relationship was one of the greatest comic duos ever, and I will miss her,” Arthur said in a statement.
When she auditioned, Getty was appearing on stage in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein’s play “Torch Song Trilogy.” In her early 60s, she flunked her “Golden Girls” test twice because it was believed she didn’t look old enough to play 80. “I could understand that,” she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. “I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast.” She came prepared for the third audition, however, wearing dowdy clothes and telling an NBC makeup artist, “To you this is just a job. To me it’s my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80.” The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys.
“The only comfort at this moment is that although Estelle has moved on, Sophia will always be with us,” White said in an e-mail to The Associated Press after Getty’s death was announced.
Sad, if not entirely unexpected, news.
It’s amazing that it’s been more than twenty years since that show debuted. An amusing fact not mentioned in the obit: Getty was two years younger than Bea Arthur, whose mother she played.
Source: ‘Golden Girls’ actress Estelle Getty dies at 84 [CNN]
