“Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever,” Witjas said in a statement. “I will miss her terribly and so will the animal world that she loved so much. I don’t think Betty ever feared passing because she always wanted to be with her most beloved husband Allen Ludden. She believed she would be with him again.”
She’s been nominated for several Golden Globes and has also been honored with lots of Lifetime Achievement Awards and celebrations through several organizations. She was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1995, the same year she earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In 2017 after 70 years, White was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. At age 95, this made her the oldest new member at the time.
The road to becoming a star would be paved with challenges for Betty Marion White Ludden, the only child of Christine Tess White and Horace Logan White, born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1922.
White was eight years old when she made her radio programming debut in 1930. Several years later in young adulthood she began working as a radio personality in Los Angeles under the guidance of disc jockey Al Jarvis. After making the transition to television, White became a staple panelist of American game shows, including Password, Match Game, Tattletales, To Tell the Truth, The Hollywood Squares, and The $25,000 Pyramid; dubbed “the first lady of game shows”, White became the first woman to receive the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host for the show Just Men! in 1983. She is also known for her appearances on The Bold and the Beautiful, Boston Legal, The Carol Burnett Show, and Saturday Night Live.
On June 14, 1963, White married television host and personality Allen Ludden, whom she had met on his game show Password as a celebrity guest in 1961, and her legal name was changed to Betty White Ludden. He proposed to White at least twice before she accepted. The couple appeared together in an episode of The Odd Couple featuring Felix’s and Oscar’s appearance on Password. Ludden appeared as a guest panelist on Match Game, with White sitting in the audience. (She was prompted to criticize one of Ludden’s wrong answers on camera during an episode of Match Game ’74.) The two appeared together on the Match Game panel in 1974, 1975, and 1980.
Allen Ludden died from stomach cancer on June 9, 1981, in Los Angeles. While they had no children together, she was a stepmother to three of his children from his first marriage to Margaret McGloin Ludden, who died of cancer in 1961. White decided not to remarry since Ludden’s death. In an interview with Larry King, when asked whether she would remarry, she replied by saying “Once you’ve had the best, who needs the rest?” When asked by James Lipton on Inside The Actor’s Studio that should Heaven exist, what would she like God to say to her when she walked through the Pearly gates, White replied: “Hello Betty. Here’s Allen.”
Back in 2018, White told Parade magazine her recipe for a long, happy life was vodka and hot dogs, “probably in that order.”
