Estelle Getty, the Golden Girls’ machine-gun-mouthed Sophia, died this morning. I can’t pretend to ever have been an enormous fan of The Golden Girls, but you had to admire the dynamism with which she took over the show: she was a pint-sized tornado of kvetchy sarcasm. (You might have been surprised to find that she was only 84 when she died, by the way, so convincingly did she pull off playing Bea Arthur’s mother, a character two decades older than Getty was.)
There’s a certain kind of actor/actress that TV, especially sitcoms, brings out the best in: people, who like Getty as Sophia, just take over a scene by the sheer force of their voice and presence. Cast one of them on your show and your show becomes them, and Golden Girls was lucky to have that happen to it with Getty.