National treasure Betty White was a ‘very passive aggressive woman’ who fat-shamed me, actor says
Actor Sally Struthers has spoken about an interaction she had with Betty White that left her with a bitter taste.
Struthers, 77, appeared on a January 13 episode of Let’s Talk About That! With Larry Saperstein and Jacob Bellotti where she admitted that she didn’t want to talk about the Golden Girls alum, who died in 2021 at 99 years old, while she was still alive.
“I know everybody loves her. They loved her so much,” the Gilmore Girls actor said, but said she “didn’t have such a great experience with her.”
She was “a very passive-aggressive woman,” said Struthers.
The actor recalled being at White’s house to work on the pilot for a new game show. During the shoot, White asked her maid to bring them a snack while they worked.
“Then the plate was set in the middle and it was cookies, I think,” Struther recalled. “So I reached for a cookie and she said in front of everyone, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you dear, you don’t need a cookie.’”
As Saperstein and Bellotti looked shocked, Struthers added, “Totally fat-shamed me in front of the rest of the people in the room.”
“And I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s not nice.’”
Despite her rocky relationship with White, Struthers reflected on her experience with another member of the Golden Girls cast, Bea Arthur, who guest-starred on Struthers’s Seventies sitcom All in the Family during its second season.
“Bea Arthur comes in and she’s a force of nature,” she said about the actress who died in 2009 aged 86.
She said that before filming, the actors read through the scripts in front of the show’s producers.
“Sometimes they’d look up. But you couldn’t count on them for a lot of laughs ‘cause they were too busy making sure we said the words that were on the page,” Struthers explained.
However, Arthur was “filthier than a drunken sailor” and “put all sorts of expletives in her lines to shock these men,” Struthers recalled.
“She would trash everyone we ever knew,” she added. “I loved how filthy she was.”
Last November, the United States Postal Service announced that White would be placed on a 2025 Forever stamp.
“An icon of American television, Betty White (1922–2021) shared her wit and warmth with viewers for seven decades,” the Postal Service said in a press release announcing the stamp, which depicts a smiling White based on a 2010 photograph by celebrity photographer Kwaku Alston. Boston-based artist Dale Stephanos created the digital illustration from Alston’s photo.
“The comedic actor, who gained younger generations of fans as she entered her 90s, was also revered as a compassionate advocate for animals.”
