Betty White Gets New U.S. Postal Service Stamp
The U.S. Postal Service announced on Friday that it will release a stamp commemorating the beloved actress Betty White in 2025. Dale Stephanos created the digital illustration based on a 2010 photograph by Kwaku Alston. Greg Breeding, an art director for USPS, designed the stamp of the late Golden Girls star grinning in front of a violet background.
USPS
White, who passed away on New Year’s Eve in 2021, a couple weeks shy of her 100th birthday, did it all in a career certified by Guinness World Records as the longest for a female entertainer: as a producer, personality, lifelong animal advocate and sitcom star. She was there at TV’s infancy, starting in 1949 filling five-and-a-half hours of daily local chitchat on live show Hollywood on Television. This gig led in the 1950s to a nationally syndicated sitcom (Life With Elizabeth), which she coproduced, and a daily talk-variety show that pushed social boundaries when she risked boycotts by hiring Black tap dancer Arthur Duncan as a regular cast member. TV Guide Magazine first took notice of Betty White in 1954, dubbing her “the first TV version of something known as America’s Sweetheart.”
TV Guide/Courtesy Everett Collection
With her sparkling eyes revealing a quick wit and eternally optimistic demeanor, she became a fixture through the 1960s in multiple day-parts: hosting the Rose Parade for 19 years, becoming a favorite guest on late-night talk shows and mastering many a game show, especially Password, hosted by her husband Allen Ludden. (She even won a 1983 Daytime Emmy for hosting NBC’s Just Men!) Her career reached a new pinnacle of prominence and acclaim when she joined the cast of pal Mary Tyler Moore’s hit 1970s sitcom in its fourth season. As fictional station WJM-TV’s lascivious “Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens, White subverted her good-girl image with glee, winning the first two of her five Primetime Emmys. (Her last was in 2010 for triumphantly hosting Saturday Night Live at 88 by popular demand, setting another record.) She received more nominations in the next decade for her snarky scene-stealing in TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland and as host of Betty White’s Off Their Rockers for NBC.
Touchstone Television/courtesy Everett Collection
White’s most indelible role came in 1985 with The Golden Girls, winning an Emmy again in 1986 as the lovably dithery Rose Nylund, a character she defended as “naive more than dumb” as she held her own in a stellar ensemble with Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty. In the book Golden Girls Forever, White said the show was “one of those things that come along I would say once in a lifetime — but my ‘once in a lifetime’ had already been used up with Mary Tyler Moore. So to get it again … how lucky can one old broad get?”
The stamp, which will be sold in packs of 20, will also feature bubbly spots in the background “that befit her sparkling personality,” the USPS added. The exact day of issue for the stamp was not announced, but stay tuned!
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