LEGENDARY Golden Girls actress Betty White passed away on Friday at 99, shocking fans across the globe. But Betty didn’t “ever fear passing,” according to a close friend, because she wanted to be reunited with her late husband, Allen Ludden. “Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever,” her […]
LEGENDARY Golden Girls actress Betty White passed away on Friday at 99, shocking fans across the globe.
But Betty didn’t “ever fear passing,” according to a close friend, because she wanted to be reunited with her late husband, Allen Ludden.
“Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever,” her agent and close friend Jeff Witjas told PEOPLE in a statement on Friday.
“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.”
Betty – whose Hollywood career spanned over more than nine decades – was 99-years-old, and only weeks from her 100th birthday on January 17th.
Betty and Allen wed in 1963 but he passed away in 1981 from cancer.
Betty has three stepchildren from her third marriage: David, Sarah, and Martha.
White married her first husband, Dick Barker in 1945 but they divorced that same year.
In 1947, Betty married Lane Allen but the pair divorced in 1949.
Her marriage to Allen was her longest.
Betty spent 18 “wonderful” years married to the celebrity game show host before he died of stomach cancer in 1981.
They met in the summer of 1961 on the set of the show Password.
Betty expressed how she wished she hadn’t turned down her keen future-husband’s initial marriage proposals.
“I spent a whole year, wasted a whole year, that Allen and I could have had together, saying, ‘No, I wouldn’t marry him,'” White told Oprah Winfrey in 2015.
“I wasted a whole year we could have had together, but we made it, we finally did.”
Allen’s first wife was in the hospital with cancer, and she died the week that he and Betty met on TV.
“I’ve had two bad marriages, and I don’t like to think of them as good mistakes. They were traumatizing to go through,” she once admitted to Newsweek.
“But they did make me appreciate it when the perfect one came along.”
During a 2018 PBS special, Betty could be seen flirting with Allen on his show Password.
He asked her about her summer plans and she cheekily responded, “Well, what did you have in mind, Allen?”
White explained in a 2010 interview that the following summer, their respective agents booked them parts in a play called Critic’s Choice in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Betty said that she got to know Allen even more when their agents booked them for the same play, called Critic’s Choice in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
“Somehow, we became instant friends,” she said.
After the three weeks working on the play, Allen asked Betty to marry him multiple times, even greeting her by asking “Will you marry me?” instead of saying “hello.”
Ludden later admitted, per Closer Weekly, “I fell in love with her opening night.”
Allen reportedly wore around a ring on a necklace until Betty said yes.
They got married in Las Vegas on June 14, 1963.
Betty made the decision to never marry again after he died.
In 2011, when asked by Joy Behar to say one choice she’d make again, Betty replied: “Marry Allen Ludden. No two ways about that. He was something special.”
She told Anderson Cooper in 2011, “I had the love of my life. I sure did. Allen Ludden… If you’ve had the best, who needs the rest?”
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