Enter Sophia: Estelle Getty acted circles around 3 veterans in her first Golden Girls scene

Counterpoint:

She seemed like the worst actress out of them all.

She needed a lot of help from her co-stars. Dementia was ongoing. Sophia was superficially interpreted. No depth and she didn't seem to understand what being Sicilian was. Italian Americans and Jewish Americans are similar not identical. In her defense the writing was awful. They could have done without her.

Did Michael J Fox live with Estelle Getty when he first moved to Hollywood? I swear I read that tidbit somewhere but I'm old so I may be confused...

She was wonderful. Betty and Rue look lovely there, must be the lighting and makeup.

Sorry I mean in a lot of episodes the lighting and makeup do them no favors, not that they weren't good looking women naturally

True, the writing was terrible, but I thought Estelle was so bad that she should have been shuffled off with Coco never to be seen again.

Yeah....the writing on Golden Girls was just so awful. Thank goodness most scenes were just them improvising!

This just gets better and better. So we're supposed to believe Sophia had her hotplate in the flimsy paper bag, and was holding it gamely in one hand? Otherwise when did she retrieve the piece of evidence which would later exonerate her from causing the great Shady Pines fire?!

R9 seek help

Estelle was great with the biting one liners, but sometimes struggled in the dramatic scenes.

Sophia was the most popular character, though she had the easier onliners. She entered a scene, delivered and usually left. Estelle d

^ estelle did this very well and any memory losses were, if anything, in character .

The other 3 were as wonderful and had more complex roles and a modicum of character development.

They were all very good.

Well she certainly wasn't the most popular with all the handsome, horny devils down at The Rusty Wanker!

It was no Designing Women.

Betty White said they all started to get frustrated with her never remembering her lines, shooting in one-sentence takes, etc. until they all talked privately and understood she was suffering.

[quote] Bea later expressed regret for being a bit of a cunt to Estelle. At the time she didn’t know Estelle was suffering memory problems and was often inpatient when she would flub her lines.

r17 They all were

I couldn’t stand her caricature of a performance on that show. She was written just so “one-note.”

Her acting consisted of moving into positon and reciting her lines in n a monotone.

As with the other two, she certainly was no Bea Arthur.

Estelle had an extremely high Q rating and the most popular character for the entire series.Witt Thomas must’ve loved her because she after the golden girls/golden palace ended she was on the last 2 years of empty nest and guested as Sophia on the other Witt Thomas shows nurses and blossom.

[quote]Italian Americans and Jewish Americans are similar not identical.

R3 Similar, nothing. She sounded like a bubeleh from the shtetl.

Take my wife, please!

Why no Golden Girls box set? Home Improvement has a super cool box set but not GG even though GG is still watched today by millions of people. Only DVDs exist.

A beautiful box set should be released with never-before-seen bloopers, interviews, backstage footage, GG games etc.

Rue was easily the best actress of the four.

I agree, R26.

In the episode when her husband comes back and she tells him that her last thought before he she learned he had died was, “Oh, George, I hate you!” because she stripped over one of his shows is delivered so well.

R25 I believe a box set was released a long while back, for a short period. It had all the season boxes inside a giant Sophia bamboo purse. Extremely hard to find now. Don't think there was any special extras though.

[quote] She needed a lot of help from her co-stars. Dementia was ongoing. Sophia was superficially interpreted. No depth and she didn't seem to understand what being Sicilian was. Italian Americans and Jewish Americans are similar not identical. In her defense the writing was awful. They could have done without her.

Completely disagree with all this. While she may have played it more Jewish than actual Italian, it worked, as audiences loved her. She was one of the most beloved parts of the show, then and now. Hence why her character continued on multiple other series the writers worked on. I wouldn't say the writing wasn't awful, just very inconsistent (which among true fans is accepted, and poked fun at). The show was stronger story-wise in the first 4 seasons, and relied more on ridiculous setups and jokes in the latter. They absolutely could not have done without her. The show worked because of the magic of all 4 of them. Golden Palace proved that. As for the character being "superficially interpreted" with "no depth", I couldn't disagree more. There were many moments when the more sentimental side of Sophia came out, and Estelle played it beautifully. But the character is clearly intended to be the one that smacks back at the others, and delivers a hard punch line. The 'tell it like it is' trope. Not really meant to be that deep of a character type.

As for her dementia, it wasn't nearly as bad in the early seasons. It was more formally diagnosed and started to be treated in the later seasons according to her sons, which began to affect her ability to remember lines, and deliver them with the sharpness and quickness the earlier Sophia had. They did their best to work with her on it, and in the end, she could still deliver one hell of a punch line. The character continued to show up on other shows for years.

Sophia used to be my least favorite character, however as I've gotten older I've come to really appreciate the character, especially her relationship with Dorothy. Estelle and Bea had great chemistry and they really conveyed a mother/daughter relationship very well. This is why the last couple of seasons when Sophia starts making explicitly cruel comments to Dorothy its hard to take as an audience member. I don't buy Sophia saying those types of things to Dorothy, that speaks to the quality of work that Estelle and Bea had done in the first four seasons.

Rue was the best actress of the three and her experience working Off-Broadway really shows. Bea was from the musical theater and Betty from tv and it shows a bit, they aren't as consistently strong in their dramatic moments as Rue is. Estelle ran hot and cold with her dramatic stuff, sometimes it felt cringe worthy and sometimes it was strong. You could clearly see she was the least experfienced performance wise.