Estelle Getty of “Golden Girls” is no longer with us.

Here’s a tribute from a fan:

From her New York Times obit:

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Long before “Golden Girls” Ms. Getty had been portraying maternal types of all sorts on the stage.

“I am the mother,” she declared in her opening line in “Torch Song Trilogy,” Harvey Fierstein’s 1981 play about the travails of a gay man in New York City, and as a summary of her career, her character was right.

“I’ve played mothers to heroes and mothers to zeroes,” Ms. Getty wrote in her autobiography, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now … So What?” (Contemporary Books, 1988). “I’ve played Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Southern mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. I’ve played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun.”

Interestingly, Getty was actually younger than Bea Arthur, who played her daughter on “Golden Girls.”

UPDATE: The L.A. Times notes that Getty played the Yiddish theater and the Catskills in her early days.

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