The Golden Girls has lost is lustiest member. Rue McClanahan, who earned an Emmy as the man-crazed Blanche Devereaux on the beloved sitcom classic, died early this morning of what her manager called a "massive stroke."
"She had her family with her. She went in peace," said Barbara Lawrence.
McClanahan had suffered a minor stroke in January while convalescing from heart bypass surgery. She was 76.
Her death leaves Betty White as the sole surviving star of the 1985-92 NBC comedy. Estelle Getty, who played Sophia, the quintessential wise-cracking little old lady, died in 2008; Bea Arthur, who yielded no ground as the sharp-tongued Dorothy, passed away a year later.
The Golden Girls itself is immortal, as McClanahan herself observed.
"It started running in reruns in 1988, and it hasn't stopped since," she told the Gay & Lesbian Times in 2008. "It dawned on me then that this might be an ongoing proposition."
Born Feb. 21, 1934, in Oklahoma, McClanahan was a wife and mother before becoming an actress at about age 30. In the beginning, she worked primarily in the New York theater. She came to Hollywood in the 1970s, tempted by roles in producer Norman Lear's groundbreaking sitcoms, All in the Family and Maude. On the latter, she played Arthur's neighbor and friend.
In 1985, at age 51, McClanahan became the youngest "girl" on The Golden Girls. The show was an immediate hit, as popular with critics as families who found themselves housebound on a pre-Internet Saturday night.
Originally, Blanche was to be played by White, who'd had man-eating experience as insatiable TV chef Sue Ann Niven on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Then it was suggested White instead give it a go at the show's most naïve character.
"So, I'm Rose, and she's Blanche," White said of McClanahan to the King Features Syndicate in 1985, "and as she said so perfectly the other day, 'I'm playing you, and you're playing me!' "
McClanahan did seem to share a certain spunk with Blanche—by the time the series premiered, McClanahan had been married and divorced five times. But according to McClanahan, her repeated trips down the aisle indicated anything but confidence.
"It was a quiet kind of desperation," she told TV Guide in 1990. "I always thought I had to have a man."
McClanahan wrote about her exes and other men, including Benson star Robert Guillaume, in the 2007 memoir, My First Five Husbands...and the Ones Who Got Away. As the title indicated, McClanahan had given marriage one more to, in 1997, to writer/actor Morrow Wilson.
After The Golden Girls, McClanahan starred with Getty and White in its one-season-only spinoff, The Golden Palace, and, later, returned to Broadway. In late 2009, McClanahan, a breast-cancer survivor, underwent heart-bypass surgery. In January of this year, she suffered a stroke. Morrow told the tabloids that McClanahan asked him to move out of their New York apartment following her heart surgery.
To the end, Blanche stayed with McClanahan, and vice versa.
"People always ask me if I'm like Blanche," McClanahan said tongue in cheek to the Cape Cod Times in 2007. "Well, Blanche was an oversexed, self-involved, man-crazy, vain Southern belle from Atlanta—and I'm not from Atlanta."
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