Everything you need to know about ‘The Golden Girls’ cast, including how old they were in the show vs real life.

Golden Girls cast & ages
Among all of the great roles she played over the course of her legendary career, the late, great Betty White—who died on Dec. 31, 2021, at the age of 99—was perhaps beloved most for her portrayal of the hilariously naive Rose Nylund on the smash-hit NBC sitcom The Golden Girls. For seven seasons, we delighted in Rose and her young-at-heart roommates Blanche Devereaux, Dorothy Zbornak and Sophia Petrillo as they navigated the single life as seniors in Miami.

Looking back, it’s a small miracle The Golden Girls’ cast came together as perfectly as it did. (Seriously, could you imagine anyone else playing those parts??) That’s for two reasons: One, while the characters’ ages on the series seemed fairly clear-cut—Blanche, Rose and Dorothy were in their mid-50s, while Sophia was Dorothy’s widowed, elderly mother—the actual ages of the actresses playing them were completely different. In fact, for all but one of the Golden Girls’ main cast members, there were huge discrepancies between their real ages and the ages of their respective characters. And two of the actresses wound up swapping roles!

Keep reading for more Golden Girls facts—including The Golden Girls’ ages—how old the characters were supposed to be on the show, compared to the actresses’ ages in real life.

How old were The Golden Girls supposed to be?

How old was Sophia Petrillo on The Golden Girls?
Sophia, Dorothy’s straight-talking mother, was the oldest character in the Golden Girls’ house. In a flashback scene in the Season 2 episode “A Piece of Cake,” it’s revealed that Sophia celebrated her 50th birthday in April 1956, meaning her character was 79 years old when the series began in 1985.

However, in real life, the actress who portrayed Sophia, Estelle Getty, was just 62, making her one year younger than her onscreen daughter! She apparently wore aging makeup while in character to make her come across as a believable, eighty-something woman.

How old was Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls?
Betty White was 63 when the series began in 1985, but she completely pulled off playing a younger character. The sweet, innocent Rose Nylund was 55 when the series began, as Dorothy revealed in the Season 1 episode “Job Hunting.”

How old was Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls?

Like White, actress Bea Arthur was 63 when the series began, although her character, Dorothy, was in her early 50s. In the 1983 episode “Nothing to Fear, But Fear Itself,” Sophia Petrillo apparently revealed that her daughter Dorothy was conceived in 1931. In another episode, Dorothy is revealed to be a Leo, meaning she has a birthday in July or August—so she was likely born in 1932, which would make her character 53 years old when the series began.

How old was Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls?
Blanche never explicitly shares her age in the series, but in a 1988 Mother’s Day episode, it was revealed that she was 17 years old in 1949, making her character about 53 years old when the show began in 1985. The actress who played her, Rue McClanahan, was 51 when the series began, making her the only Golden Girls actress whose real-life age more or less corresponded with her character’s.

Were The Golden Girls stars friends in real life?
The Golden Girls were friends on the show, but did the actresses have the same chemistry off-camera? In an interview from the Archive of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, McClanahan revealed that she didn’t have the warmest friendship with Arthur.

“Bea and I didn’t have a lot of relationship going on. Bea is a very, very eccentric woman. She wouldn’t go to lunch [with me] unless Betty [White] would go with her,” McClanahan said. “She was very dependent on keeping everything as it always had been, and I was anything but that.”

Ironically, McClanahan was the one who convinced Arthur to take the role, which she had been reluctant to play.

“I called her and said, ‘Why are you going to turn down the best script that’s ever going to come across your desk as long as you live?'”

McClanahan had a much closer relationship with White. “Betty and I loved word games, and we would play word games every day,” she said. “We had games going all the time off camera.”

Fun fact: McClanahan was originally slated to play the role of Rose, and White was set to play the role of Blanche. During the audition process, producers asked the women to read each other’s parts and decided to swap roles, much to McClanahan’s delight.

“It would have been painful for me to have to go to work every day and play Rose,” she admitted. “They loved what [Betty] did. She did a beautiful, funny job [with Rose

Although the women will forever be linked to their famous characters, McClanahan admits that they couldn’t be more different from their Golden Girls personas.

“None of us was like any of our characters,” she said. “People ask me if I am like Blanche and my standard answer is: ‘Get serious! Look at the facts, Blanche is a man-crazy, glamorous, extremely sexy, successful with men Southern belle from Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m not from Atlanta!'”

“We weren’t like our characters at all. Betty probably the least of all. I would say Estelle [Getty] was more like Sophia, although she wasn’t at all pushy or vitriolic. Estelle was funny. She was Jewish, New York funny. She kept saying, ‘Can’t we make these characters Jewish?’ She would have felt so much more comfortable than trying to be Italian, although it worked.”

“Bea was the straightest character, the least eccentric, but certainly Dorothy’s failure in life was very different from Bea’s huge success in life. Bea has got a very funny take on people and she’s quick-witted. And Betty has nothing but brains. She’s almost as smart as I am!”

The actress also revealed that Getty suffered from an extreme case of stage fright.

“She had an awful time remembering her lines because she would freeze and panic,” she said. “She would start getting under a dark cloud the day before tape day; you could see a big difference in her on that day. She was unreachable. She was just as uptight as a human being can get. When your brain is frozen like that, you can’t remember lines. I would always say to her, ‘Now listen, Estelle, here’s the way to do it. Don’t try to think of what word comes after what word, think of the picture and tell the story,’ but she was so scared that she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of her name, poor little thing.”

Despite any drama off camera, the women were convincing as four friends who would do anything for one another.

“We got lots of letters from teenage girls who were unhappy at home and wanted to move in with us. They thought it was real life,” she said. “The appeal of these four characters was their warmth and friendship and the fact that we stuck together through thick and thin.”

McClanahan passed away in 2010 at age 76 from a stroke. Arthur died from cancer in 2009 at age 86, and Getty, who suffered from Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease, died in 2008 at age 84. The last surviving Golden Girls star, White died December 31, 2021, at 99.