Betty Marion White Ludden
January 17, 1922 – December 31, 2021
Entertainment Tonight Tribute to Betty White
Betty Marion White Ludden was an American actress and comedian. A pioneer of early television, with a career spanning seven decades. White was noted for her vast work in the entertainment industry and being one of the first women to work both in front of and behind the camera.
Betty was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on January 17, 1922. She was the only child of Christine Tess (née Cachikis), a homemaker, and Horace Logan White, a lighting company executive from Michigan. White's family moved to Alhambra, California in 1923 when she was a little over a year old, and later to Los Angeles during the Great Depression. She initially aspired to a career as a forest ranger, but was unable to accomplish this because women were not allowed to serve as rangers at that time. Instead, White pursued an interest in writing. She wrote and played the lead in a graduation play at Horace Mann School, and discovered her interest in performing.
After the United States entered World War II, White volunteered for the American Women's Voluntary Services. While volunteering with the American Women's Voluntary Services, White met her first husband Dick Barker, a United States Army Air Forces P-38 pilot. After the war, the couple married and moved to Belle Center, Ohio, where Barker owned a chicken farm; he wanted to embrace a simpler life, but White did not enjoy this. They returned to Los Angeles and divorced within a year. In 1947, she married Lane Allen, a Hollywood talent agent. They divorced in 1949 because he wanted a family but she wanted a career rather than children. On June 14, 1963, White married television host and personality Allen Ludden, whom she had met on his game show Password as a celebrity guest in 1961, and her legal name was changed to Betty White Ludden. He proposed to White at least twice before she accepted. Allen Ludden died from stomach cancer on June 9, 1981, in Los Angeles. White never remarried. When asked the reason for this in an interview with Larry King, White responded by saying "Once you've had the best, who needs the rest?".
White earned a Guinness World Record for "Longest TV career by an entertainer (female)" in 2014 and in 2018 for her lengthy work in television. White received eight Emmy Awards in various categories, three American Comedy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Grammy Award. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and was a 1995 Television Hall of Fame inductee. On the morning of December 31, 2021, White died in her sleep at her home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles from a stroke she had on Christmas Day.
Article paraphrased from Betty’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_White
January 17, 1922 – December 31, 2021
