Bea Arthur
Beatrice Arthur was an American actress, comedian and singer. She began her career on stage in 1947, attracting critical acclaim before achieving worldwide recognition for her work on television beginning in the 1970s as Maude Findlay in the popular sitcoms All in the Family and Maude and later in the 1980s and 1990s as Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls.
Arthur won several accolades throughout her career, beginning with the 1966 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing Vera Charles in Mame. She won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1977 for Maude and 1988 for The Golden Girls. Arthur has received the third most nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series with nine; after Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mary Tyler Moore. Arthur was inducted into the academy's Television Hall of Fame in 2008.
Arthur's film appearances include Lovers and Other Strangers and the film version of Mame. In 2002, she starred in the one-woman show Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends. An obituary described Arthur as "the tall, deep-voiced actress whose razor-sharp delivery of comedy lines made her a TV star."
Early life, family, education and military service
Bernice Frankel was born on May 13, 1922, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, to Rebecca and Philip Frankel. Arthur was raised in a Jewish home with her older sister Gertrude and younger sister Marian.In 1933, the Frankel family relocated to Cambridge, Maryland, where her parents subsequently operated a women's clothing shop. At age 16, Beatrice developed a serious condition, coagulopathy, in which her blood would not clot. Concerned for her health, her parents sent her to Linden Hall, an all-girls' boarding school in Lititz, Pennsylvania, for her final two years of high school. Afterwards, she studied for a year at Blackstone College for Girls in Blackstone, Virginia.
During World War II, Frankel enlisted as one of the first members of the United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve in 1943. After boot camp, she served as a typist at Marine headquarters in Washington, D.C. In June 1943, the Marine Corps accepted her transfer request to the Motor Transport School at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Frankel then worked as a truck driver and dispatcher in Cherry Point, North Carolina, between 1944 and 1945. She was honorably discharged at the rank of staff sergeant in September 1945.
After serving in the Marines, Frankel studied for a year at the Franklin School of Science and Arts in Philadelphia, where she became a licensed medical technician. After interning at a local hospital for the summer, she decided against working as a lab technician, departing for New York City in 1947 to enroll in the School of Drama at The New School. She would also study under Lee Strasberg.
Career
Theater
From 1947, Arthur studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City with German director Erwin Piscator.Arthur began her acting career as a member of an off-Broadway theater group at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City in the late 1940s. Onstage, her roles included Lucy Brown in the 1954 Off-Broadway premiere of Marc Blitzstein's English-language adaptation of Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera, Nadine Fesser in the 1957 premiere of Herman Wouk's Nature's Way at the Coronet Theatre, Yente the Matchmaker in the 1964 premiere of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway.
In 1966, Arthur auditioned for the title role in the musical Mame, which her husband Gene Saks was set to direct, but Angela Lansbury won the role instead. Arthur accepted the supporting role of Vera Charles, for which she won great acclaim, winning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical the same year. She reprised the role in the 1974 film version opposite Lucille Ball. In 1981, she appeared on stage in Woody Allen's The Floating Light Bulb.
Arthur made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1994 portraying the Duchess of Krakenthorp in Gaetano Donizetti's La fille du régiment. In 1995, she starred opposite Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna in Bermuda Avenue Triangle in Los Angeles.
Television
Arthur accepted a 1971 invitation from Norman Lear to guest-star on his sitcom All in the Family, as Maude Findlay, the cousin of Edith Bunker. An outspoken liberal feminist, Maude was considered the antithesis to the reactionary character of Archie Bunker, who described her as a "New Deal fanatic". At the age of 49, Arthur's performance on All in the Family impressed viewers as well as television executives at CBS who, she would later recall, asked "'Who is that girl? Let's give her her own series.'"Maude previewed in her second All in the Family appearance. Debuting in 1972, the series found her living in the affluent community of Tuckahoe, Westchester County, New York, with her fourth husband, Walter and divorced daughter, Carol. Arthur's performance as Maude garnered her several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for the series, with Arthur winning an Emmy in 1977 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. Maude earned a place for Arthur in the history of the women's liberation movement.
The series addressed serious sociopolitical topics of the era that were considered taboo for a television sitcom, including the Vietnam War, the Nixon Administration, Maude's bid for a Congressional seat, divorce, menopause, drug use, alcoholism, nervous breakdown, mental illness, women's lib, gay rights, abortion and spousal abuse. A prime example is "Maude's Dilemma", a two-part episode airing near Thanksgiving 1972 in which Maude grapples with a late-life pregnancy, ultimately deciding to have an abortion. Even though abortion had been legal in New York state since 1970, as well as in California since its state's 1969 on-demand ruling, it was illegal in many other regions of the country and, as such, the episode sparked controversy. As a result, dozens of network affiliates refused to broadcast the episode, substituting either a repeat from earlier in the season or a Thanksgiving TV special in its place. However, by the time of the summer rerun season six months later, the uproar was reduced and the stations that had refused to air the episode upon its first run now ran it for broadcast. As a result, a reported 65 million viewers watched the two-episode arc either on first run that November or during the following summer. The episode first aired two months before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the procedure nationwide in the Roe v. Wade outcome in January 1973.
Arthur decided to exit the series during its sixth season. Later in 1978, she appeared in the Star Wars Holiday Special, in which she performed a song in the Mos Eisley cantina. She hosted The Beatrice Arthur Special for CBS on January 19, 1980, leading a musical comedy revue with Rock Hudson, Melba Moore and Wayland Flowers with Madame.
Arthur returned to television in the short-lived 1983 sitcom Amanda's. Ten of the show's thirteen episodes were aired.In 1985, Arthur was cast in The Golden Girls, in which she played Dorothy Zbornak, a divorced mother and substitute teacher living in a Miami, Florida, house owned by widow Blanche Devereaux. Her other roommates included widow Rose Nylund and Dorothy's Sicilian mother, Sophia Petrillo. The series was a massive hit and remained a top-ten rating fixture for six of its seven seasons. Arthur's performances led to several Emmy nominations over the course of the series and Arthur won an Emmy in 1988. Arthur left the show after the end of the seventh season and the series ended. In 1992, it was retooled as The Golden Palace with the other three actresses and aired on CBS as it was not picked up by NBC. The new series, however, lasted only one season.
In 1984, Arthur, who routinely declined commercial endorsements, accepted a lucrative offer from Canadian drugstore chain Shoppers Drug Mart to be their commercial spokeswoman, on the condition that the commercials would not air in the United States. Arthur spent seven years in the position, continuing as spokeswoman during her run on The Golden Girls by commuting to Toronto for commercial tapings.
Film
Arthur reprised her stage role as Vera Charles in the 1974 film adaption of Mame, opposite Lucille Ball. She portrayed overbearing mother Bea Vecchio in Lovers and Other Strangers and had a cameo as a Roman unemployment clerk in Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I. She appeared in the 1995 American movie For Better or Worse as Beverly Makeshift. Her final film credit was in Enemies of Laughter in 2000, opposite Peter Falk.Later career
After Arthur left The Golden Girls, she made guest appearances on television shows and organized and toured in her one-woman show, alternately titled An Evening with Bea Arthur as well as And Then There's Bea. She made a guest appearance on the American cartoon Futurama, in the Emmy-nominated 2001 episode "Amazon Women in the Mood", as the voice of the feminist "Femputer" who ruled a race of giant Amazonian women. She appeared in a first-season episode of Malcolm in the Middle as Mrs. White, one of Dewey's babysitters who was a strict disciplinarian. She was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her performance. She appeared as Larry David's mother on Curb Your Enthusiasm.In 2002, she returned to Broadway, starring in Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends, a collection of stories and songs based on her life and career. The show was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event.
In addition to appearing in programs looking back at her own work, Arthur performed in stage and television tributes for Jerry Herman, Bob Hope, Ellen DeGeneres. In 2004, she appeared in Richard Barone's "There'll Be Another Spring: A Tribute to Miss Peggy Lee" at the Hollywood Bowl, performing "Johnny Guitar" and "The Shining Sea". In 2005, she participated in the Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson, where she recited sexually explicit passages from Anderson's book Star Struck in a deadpan fashion.