R.I.P: Golden Girl McClanahan

Emmy-winning actress Rue McClanahan, famous for playing the sexually charged Southern belle Blanche Devereaux on the hit TV series “The Golden Girls,” has died at age 76. Her manager Barbara Lawrence said McClanahan died Thursday at 1 a.m. of a stroke. She received treatment for breast cancer in 1997 and held lectures for cancer support groups on “aging gracefully.” In 2009, she had heart bypass surgery. McClanahan was active with a career in off-Broadway and regional stages in the 1960s before she was tapped for TV in the 1970s for the key best-friend character on the hit series “Maude,” starring Beatrice Arthur. It was in 1985 when she co-starred with Arthur, Betty White and Estelle Getty in “The Golden Girls,” a runaway hit that broke the sitcom mold focusing on four aging women living together in Miami.  “Golden Girls” aimed to show “that when people mature, they add layers,” she told The New York Times in 1985. “They don’t turn into other creatures. The truth is we all still have our child, our adolescent, and your young woman living in us.” McClanahan earned an Emmy in 1987 for her work on the show. McClanahan continued working in television, on stage and in film, appearing in the Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau vehicle “Out to Sea” and as the biology teacher in “Starship Troopers.” In 2008, McClanahan also starred in Logo network’s comedy “Sordid Lives: The Series,” playing the elderly mother of an institutionalized drag queen. McClanahan was born Eddi-Rue McClanahan in Healdton, Okla., to building contractor William McClanahan and his wife, Dreda Rheua-Nell, a beautician. She graduated with honors from the University of Tulsa with a degree in German and theater arts. McClanahan’s start was on stage. According to a 1985 Los Angeles Times article, she appeared at the Pasadena Playhouse, in California, studied in New York with Uta Hagen and Harold Clurman, and worked in both soaps and theatre. McClanahan was married six times: Tom Bish, (has a son, Mark Bish, from the marriage); actor Norman Hartweg; Peter D’Maio; Gus Fisher; and Tom Keel. She married husband Morrow Wilson on Christmas Day in 1997. She wrote her memoirs in a book titled “My First Five Husbands … And the Ones Who Got Away.”