R.I.P. Estelle Getty
Early life & career
Getty was born Estelle Scher in New York City, New York, the daughter of Sarah and Charles Scher, who worked in the glass business. Getty got her start in the Yiddish theater, and her most important stage role was playing Harvey Fierstein's mother on Broadway in the play Torch Song Trilogy. She is best known for her role as Sophia Petrillo on the popular 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls. Petrillo was a wise-cracking old Sicilian mother of Dorothy Zbornak, the show's main protagonist, played by Beatrice Arthur. Getty was actually one year younger than Arthur.
Toward the end of her career, she wrote an autobiography, with Steve Delsohn, titled If I Knew Then, What I Know Now. . . So What? (Contemporary Books, 1988).
Personal life
Getty was married to Arthur Gettleman (from whose name she adapted her stage name) from 1946 until his death in 2004. Getty had two sons, now grown: Carl Gettleman, who lives in California, and Barry Gettleman, who lives in Florida.
In 1991, as later reported in Star magazine, Getty helped her 29-year-old nephew Steven Scher, who was suffering from the final stages of AIDS and near death.[citation needed] Because Scher's parents lived in England and his friends no were longer able to care for him in Greensboro, North Carolina, Estelle had him flown to California and admitted to hospice care. He died in January 1992.
In 2000, Getty stopped making public appearances after revealing she had Parkinson's Disease and osteoporosis. In 2002, media reports claimed she was also suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Doctors later discovered she actually had Lewy body dementia; both the Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diagnoses were incorrect. In 2003, Lifetime television hosted a Golden Girls reunion, but Getty did not appear due to her failing health.
On July 22, 2008, at approximately 5:30 a.m. PDT, Getty died in her Hollywood Boulevard home in Los Angeles, three days before her 85th birthday.
