While I do admit that Sophia Petrillo was my favorite “Golden Girls” character, with Dorothy Zbornak being second, Rose Nylund, played by Betty White, was my extremely close third. To tell the truth, I love all four women on the show… this was a time when lightning was caught in a bottle and the chemistry between all four was off the charts. I feel dirty even ranking them… and I did enjoy this compilation video of Rose.
This video, while not able to capture all of Rose’s best moments, still gives a great sample of the sweet Scandinavian depression hotline worker. The thing with Rose was, she had an incredibly long fuse… it took a LOT to get her angry. But when she did… Mt. Vesuvius was less wrathful in its eruption. Of course, she’d go back to being sweet Rose five minutes later. I enjoyed every second of this video.
When it comes to Rose, there are three basic aspects to her character: she’s naïve to the point of being called a dimwit (but everybody knows she’s really sharp as a tack), she tells really long stories about her days in St. Olaf that don’t really serve a purpose – though Dorothy’s reactions are usually priceless, and peppering her sentences with various Scandinavian words that are often hilarious . Ironically, White was supposed to play Blanche and McClanahan Rose, but since she’d just played Sue Ann Nivens, another sexpot, she opted for Rose, and the rest is TV history.
The sad thing was, even though some of the best interactions on the show were between Dorothy and Rose, Arthur didn’t really like White in real life. This is something that White herself has admitted in interviews, so it’s not baseless speculation. So, perhaps some of that hostility that Dorothy showed Rose in some of her lines was real. Then again, it wouldn’t be hard to pretend to be mad at some of the stories that Rose told…
White is going to appear as Rose in the “Golden Girls” reboot. It’s going to be nice to see her slip into that naïve character again after her turn as the caustic Elka Ostrovsky on “Hot In Cleveland.” What do you think of that and the video? Let us know in the comments. Also, please “Like” us on Facebook.
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