Betty White is best known for The Golden Girls but her decades-long career included many other movie and TV roles. Heres a guide to her work.




Betty White might be best known as The Golden Girls Rose, but here's a guide to her impressive, groundbreaking career. White got her start in the'40s working on radio shows, in addition to occasional work on TV shows like ABC's This Is Your FBI. She later earned her own radio program called The Betty White Show  which proved to be the first of three shows to bear that name. White's career evolved in a major way in the early 50s when she fronted sitcom Life With Elizabeth, based on a character from White's talk show Hollywood On Television.


During her time on Life With Elizabeth she also hosted another Betty White Show, an NBC talk show. She was notably given creative free reign, which was incredibly rare for a female performer during this period. After a bad experience working on the ill-fated sitcom Date With The Angels, White reinvented herself in the '60s with guest appearances on game shows like Password, Whats My Line?, Match Game and many others. She also made her first film appearance in the 1962 political film Advise & Consent alongside Henry Fonda. During this time she also made appearances on The Tonight Show hosted by Jack Paar.


Though she was primarily known as a comedic actress, White was also talented and skilled when it came to drama, as she showed when she made a short appearance in the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. She played the character of Ann Douglas, a woman who has a toxic ability to ignore her husband’s abuse of her own daughter.


After her time playing Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls  one of Betty White's most likable roles - she took a different turn with many of her subsequent appearances. One of her best, and funniest, was that of Catherine Piper on Boston Lega.While she might have appeared to be just a simple old lady to some, Catherine was quite capable of committing various crimes, including both murder and robbery. However, the fact that she was played by Betty White made her as charming and irresistible as all of the actresss other notable roles.