“Thank you for being a friend.” Andrew Gold first took that song to No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978, but most of us never heard it as his record. We heard it as Cynthia Fee’s version over the opening credits of The Golden Girls, which premiered on NBC on September 14, 1985, and ran seven seasons and 180 episodes until its finale on May 9, 1992. Along the way, it won 11 Emmys, and every one of its four leading ladies took one home.
What made it special was simple. Four women past 50 argued, dated and ate cheesecake at midnight, and the show never treated them as a punchline. All four of those women are gone now, but not everyone who passed through that Miami kitchen is. Here is what became of the show’s wider family and which members of the Golden Girls cast are still alive, starting with the first we lost and ending with the faces still working today.
Is Herb Edelman still alive?
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Stan Zbornak was the man audiences loved to boo. He had walked out on Dorothy after 38 years of marriage for a flight attendant, and yet he kept turning up at the front door with a new scheme, a new hairpiece or a new reason he needed her. Herb Edelman made the heel strangely lovable, and the role earned him an Emmy nomination.
Born in Brooklyn on November 5, 1933, Edelman broke through on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park in 1963, and a few years later he played Murray the cop in the movie version of The Odd Couple.
Edelman died in Los Angeles on July 21, 1996, at 62, only four years after the final episode aired. His family chose not to disclose the cause at the time, as The Spokesman-Review reported, though later accounts attribute his death to emphysema.
Is Estelle Getty still alive?
Sophia Petrillo arrived in the pilot after her retirement home, Shady Pines, burned down, and a stroke had supposedly wiped out her ability to hold her tongue. “Picture it” became her calling card. The secret behind the character was that Estelle Getty was actually younger than Bea Arthur, the woman playing her daughter, and it took a gray wig and heavy makeup to age her up, a story we’ve told before.
Born Estelle Scher in New York City on July 25, 1923, Getty got her big break at nearly 60, when Harvey Fierstein cast her as the mother in Torch Song Trilogy on Broadway. Producers had planned on Sophia being an occasional visitor, but Getty was so funny that they made her a regular. She later played Sylvester Stallone’s mother in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot in 1992 and retired after failing health set in.
Getty died at her Hollywood home on July 22, 2008, three days before her 85th birthday, and her family said the cause was Lewy body dementia, which doctors had first mistaken for Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Associated Press. She was 84.
Is Bea Arthur still alive?
Nobody delivered a silent stare like Dorothy Zbornak, the substitute teacher who could end an argument without saying a word. Bea Arthur, born Bernice Frankel in Brooklyn on May 13, 1922, had already won a Tony for Mame in 1966 and an Emmy for Maude in 1977 when she moved into the house on Richmond Street.
She was also the reason the show ended. After seven seasons, Arthur decided she was done, and the people who worked with her later said she felt the writing had run out of road, as we explored in the real story of her exit. Dorothy married Blanche’s uncle Lucas, played by Leslie Nielsen, and drove off to Atlanta in the finale.
Arthur kept performing in her own way. Her one-woman show Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends earned a Tony nomination in 2002, and a guest turn on Malcolm in the Middle brought her another Emmy nomination.
She died of cancer at her Los Angeles home on April 25, 2009, at 86, as her spokesman Dan Watt told the Associated Press. Betty White’s statement to Entertainment Tonight was short and honest: “I knew it would hurt, I just didn’t know it would hurt this much.”
Is Rue McClanahan still alive?
Blanche Devereaux almost wasn’t Rue McClanahan’s part. “When they sent me the script for The Golden Girls, they had me in mind for Rose,” she told the Associated Press. “But I took to Blanche. They were thinking of Betty White for Blanche.” Director Jay Sandrich pushed for the switch because he thought Blanche was too close to White’s man-hungry Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, according to TheWrap. McClanahan won her Emmy for the role in 1987.
Born in Healdton, Oklahoma, on February 21, 1934, she had already played Vivian on Maude. After The Golden Palace closed, she went back to the stage and played Madame Morrible in Wicked on Broadway from 2005 into 2006. She also wrote a memoir with a title Blanche would have loved, My First Five Husbands… And the Ones Who Got Away, in 2007. She was married six times in all.
McClanahan had survived breast cancer in the 1990s and heart bypass surgery in 2009. She died of a brain hemorrhage at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on June 3, 2010, at 76, her manager Barbara Lawrence said. That left Betty White as the last Golden Girl, and White put it plainly: “Rue was a close and dear friend. I treasured our relationship. It hurts more than I ever thought it would, if that’s even possible.”
Is Harold Gould still alive?
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Rose finally found a steady man in Miles Webber, the gentle professor Harold Gould played in 12 episodes across three seasons. He came back for two episodes of The Golden Palace, where viewers learned that Miles had moved on and married someone else.
Gould was born Harold Vernon Goldstein in Schenectady, New York, on December 10, 1923. TV fans already knew him as Martin Morgenstern, Rhoda’s father, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, and moviegoers knew him as Kid Twist in The Sting in 1973. He was nominated for five Emmys over a career that lasted until 2010.
He died of prostate cancer on September 11, 2010, at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills, California. He was 86, according to TheWrap and the Television Academy.
Is Charles Levin still alive?
Only the most devoted fans remember Coco. In the pilot, the four women shared their house with a gay cook and houseboy played by Charles Levin, but the episode ran long and Sophia was such a hit that the producers made Getty a regular. Writers also felt that a live-in cook would steal the kitchen table, which was where the best scenes happened, and Coco was gone by episode two.
Levin, born in Chicago on March 12, 1949, kept working steadily, including a run as Eddie Gregg on Hill Street Blues from 1982 to 1986. Many viewers remember him best as the nervous mohel in the 1993 Seinfeld episode “The Bris.”
His ending was a sad one. Levin had retired to Grants Pass, Oregon, and in July 2019 his son reported him missing. His car was found stuck on a remote road with his pug dead inside, and his body was found nearby. He was 70. Authorities ruled his death an accident in November 2019 and said he had likely left the car to look for help and fallen about 30 feet down an embankment, as Gulf News and other outlets reported at the time.
Is Betty White still alive?
Rose Nylund of St. Olaf, Minnesota, told her endless farm stories with a straight face, and Betty White made sure she was never stupid, just sweetly literal. White, born in Oak Park, Illinois, on January 17, 1922, won the Emmy for lead actress in a comedy in 1986, the first of the four to win.
She outlasted everyone, and her career only grew. In 2010, a fan campaign on Facebook landed her a turn as host of Saturday Night Live. She was 88, the oldest host the show had ever had at the time, and the episode won her another Emmy. From 2010 to 2015 she was back on a weekly sitcom as Elka on Hot in Cleveland.
For 11 years she was the last Golden Girl. White died in her sleep at her Brentwood home on December 31, 2021, at 99, just 17 days before her 100th birthday, as we reported that day. Her death certificate listed a stroke she suffered on December 25 as the cause, according to the Associated Press.
Is Cheech Marin still alive?
Yes. When Dorothy left, Rose, Blanche and Sophia sold the house and bought a Miami hotel in The Golden Palace, which ran for 24 episodes on CBS from September 1992 to May 1993. Cheech Marin played Chuy Castillos, the hotel chef who clashed with Sophia over whose cooking ruled the kitchen.
He took the job for one reason. “I wanted to work on this show because I wanted to work with Betty White,” Marin told People in 2025. “Betty White was the very first person I ever saw on TV as a kid,” he said, recalling that she was “just the cutest thing I’d ever seen.” On set, he said, “We became very good friends on that show.”
Born in South Los Angeles on July 13, 1946, Marin had already made his name as half of Cheech and Chong, and he went on to co-star on Nash Bridges. These days his energy goes to art. His collection of Chicano paintings anchors The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture in Riverside, California, which opened in 2022. Now 80, he is still telling that story to live audiences, and on October 1 he took the stage in Rancho Cucamonga, California, to talk about the road from counterculture comedy to the museum that bears his name.
Is Don Cheadle still alive?
Yes. Don Cheadle was 27 when he signed on as Roland Wilson, the hotel manager who had to keep three strong-willed women from running the place into the ground. When Betty White died, he shared a memory from The Golden Palace set that went straight to the heart. Lighting the two of them together was hard, he wrote, and one day he arrived to find she had darkened her makeup and hair to help. “Nobody asked her to do it,” he added, in a tribute we shared. “She was the goldenest of them all.”
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 29, 1964, Cheadle later earned an Oscar nomination for Hotel Rwanda, won a Golden Globe for House of Lies and has played James Rhodes, also known as War Machine, in Marvel movies since Iron Man 2 in 2010. At 61, he is busier than ever. He made his Broadway debut this spring opposite Ayo Edebiri in a revival of Proof, which played the Booth Theatre from March through July, according to Playbill.
Is George Clooney still alive?
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Yes, and he may be the most surprising name on this list. In the May 1987 episode “To Catch a Neighbor,” a young George Clooney played Bobby Hopkins, a police detective who stakes out the house next door and pretends to be Sophia’s grandson so the suspects won’t catch on. It was one episode, years before ER made him a star.
He never forgot it. “They were all hysterically funny, but Bea Arthur really made me laugh,” Clooney said on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2022, calling her “the funniest person in the world.” When ABC marked the show’s 40th anniversary with a 20/20 special in 2025, he said it again: “She made me laugh harder than anybody,” as TVLine reported.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, on May 6, 1961, Clooney is 65 now, with two Oscars on his shelf. This month he has been filming In Love with Annette Bening, a drama based on Amy Bloom’s memoir. Nearly 40 years after he sat in that wicker-filled living room, he still names Bea Arthur as the one who made him laugh the hardest.