Bea Arthur won several accolades throughout her career, beginning with the 1966 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing Vera Charles in Mame.
42 Facts About Bea Arthur
2.
Bea Arthur won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1977 for Maude and 1988 for The Golden Girls.
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Bea Arthur has received the third most nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series with nine; after Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mary Tyler Moore.
4.
Bea Arthur was inducted into the academy's Television Hall of Fame in 2008.
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Bea Arthur was raised in a Jewish home with her older sister Gertrude and younger sister Marian.
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Bea Arthur was honorably discharged at the rank of staff sergeant in September 1945.
7.
From 1947, Bea Arthur studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City with German director Erwin Piscator.
8.
Bea Arthur began her acting career as a member of an off-Broadway theater group at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City in the late 1940s.
9.
In 1966, Bea Arthur auditioned for the title role in the musical Mame, which her husband Gene Saks was set to direct, but Angela Lansbury won the role instead.
10.
Bea Arthur accepted the supporting role of Vera Charles, for which she won great acclaim, winning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical the same year.
11.
Bea Arthur reprised the role in the 1974 film version opposite Lucille Ball.
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Bea Arthur made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1994 portraying the Duchess of Krakenthorp in Gaetano Donizetti's La fille du regiment.
13.
In 1971, Bea Arthur was invited by Norman Lear to guest-star on his sitcom All in the Family, as Maude Findlay, the cousin of the character Edith Bunker.
14.
In 1978, during the show's sixth season, Bea Arthur decided to exit the series.
15.
Bea Arthur hosted The Beatrice Arthur Special on CBS on January 19,1980, which paired the star in a musical comedy revue with Rock Hudson, Melba Moore and Wayland Flowers and Madame.
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Bea Arthur returned to television in the short-lived 1983 sitcom Amanda's.
17.
In 1985, Bea Arthur was cast in The Golden Girls, in which she played Dorothy Zbornak, a divorced mother and substitute teacher living in a Miami, Florida, house owned by widow Blanche Devereaux.
18.
Bea Arthur's performances led to several Emmy nominations over the course of the series and Bea Arthur won an Emmy in 1988.
19.
Bea Arthur left the show after the end of the seventh season and the series ended.
20.
Bea Arthur spent seven years in the position, continuing as spokeswoman during her run on The Golden Girls by commuting to Toronto for commercial tapings.
21.
Bea Arthur reprised her stage role as Vera Charles in the 1974 film adaption of Mame, opposite Lucille Ball.
22.
Bea Arthur appeared in the 1995 American movie For Better or Worse as Beverly Makeshift.
23.
Bea Arthur made a guest appearance on the American cartoon Futurama, in the Emmy-nominated 2001 episode "Amazon Women in the Mood", as the voice of the feminist "Femputer" who ruled a race of giant Amazonian women.
24.
Bea Arthur appeared in a first-season episode of Malcolm in the Middle as Mrs White, one of Dewey's babysitters who was a strict disciplinarian.
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Bea Arthur was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her performance.
26.
Bea Arthur appeared as Larry David's mother on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
27.
Bea Arthur was a longtime champion of equal rights for women and an active advocate of the elderly and Jewish communities in both her major television roles and through her charity work and personal outspokenness.
28.
Late in life, Bea Arthur took up the cause of LGBTQ+ youth homelessness.
29.
Bea Arthur raised $40,000 for the Ali Forney Center with one of her final live performances, a revival of her one-woman Broadway show in 2005 after she had fallen ill with cancer.
30.
Bea Arthur was a private and introverted woman according to her friends.
31.
Bea Arthur was a particularly close mentor and friend to Adrienne Barbeau, who co-starred with her on Maude for six seasons.
32.
Bea Arthur was fantastic and, you know, I realized years later how much I took it for granted because it was my first experience on television.
33.
Bea Arthur was not Maude when she wasn't saying those lines.
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Bea Arthur had her sons, her dog, and her cooking and she wasn't into the celebrity scene and she was a great lady.
35.
Bea Arthur died of lung cancer at her home in Brentwood, Los Angeles on April 25,2009, aged 86.
36.
Bea Arthur bequeathed $300,000 to the Ali Forney Center, a New York City organization that provides housing for homeless LGBTQ+ youths.
37.
The Bea Arthur Residence, which opened in 2017, is an 18-bed residence in Manhattan for homeless LGBT youth operated by the Ali Forney Center.
38.
An Emmy and Tony Award winner, Bea Arthur was an Academy Award away from achieving the Triple Crown of Acting status.
39.
Bea Arthur won the American Theatre Wing's Tony Award in 1966 as Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance that year as Vera Charles in the original Broadway production of Jerry Herman's musical Mame.
40.
Bea Arthur received the third most nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series with nine; only Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mary Tyler Moore have more.
41.
Bea Arthur was inducted into the academy's Television Hall of Fame in 2008.
42.
Bea Arthur accepted the award with McClanahan and White.