Can you imagine anyone other than the late, great Bea Arthur playing Dorothy Zbornak on “The Golden Girls?” Showrunner Susan Harris couldn’t. But if one NBC executive had his way, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty might have played opposite another actress in one of the best shows of the ’80s.
During a Pride LIVE! Hollywood festival panel dedicated to the 40th anniversary of “The Golden Girls,” casting director Joel Thurm revealed that then-head of NBC Entertainment Brandon Tartikoff absolutely did not want the “Maude” star to play Dorothy. Tartikoff apparently felt that Arthur just wasn’t very likable due to her low Q scores, and so he pushed Harris to seek another actress for the role. Harris — who already had a history with Arthur on “Maude”— was dead set on her choice, so, as you can imagine, this led to some friction behind the scenes — and Thurm was caught right in the middle.
“[This] created a big problem, but I never knew how dug in Susan was, because I just wasn’t in the room where those kind of discussions happened,” Thurm said (via The Hollywood Reporter). “So my job, according to Brandon, was to find someone that Susan would be happy with instead of Bea Arthur. I should have realized that she wouldn’t have been happy with anybody besides Bea, but I was too naive, and I thought, ‘Oh, I have someone. Her name is Elaine Stritch. She has the same acidic quality, you know, stare at you and give you the same thing that Bea does.'”
Joel Thurm tapped Broadway legend Elaine Stritch to audition for the role of Dorothy
The late Elaine Stritch was a Tony-winning Broadway legend and Emmy-winning TV actress who, like Bea Arthur, was known for her dry wit and deadpan delivery. Modern audiences might know her best as Colleen Donaghy, Jack’s mother, on one of the best NBC shows of all time: “30 Rock.” When the time came to bring her in for her audition, however, Joel Thurm immediately knew it was a lost cause.
“None of the people associated with ‘Golden Girls’ wanted her,” Thurm said. ‘So this woman had to walk into a freezer of an office and try to make it funny. Stritch asked Susan one thing, it was something like, ‘Is it OK if I change something?’ And Susan said, ‘Yes, only the punctuation.’ There was no love in that room.” Thurm went on to explain that he ultimately felt bad for Stritch in the end, because she was brought into a no-win situation.
As for Stritch’s own account of her “Golden Girls” audition, she recalls flubbing the audition due to her language. She later told The Guardian that she was supposed to deliver the line, “Ying, don’t forget the hors d’oeuvres”, but suggested, “Would it be all right if I said, ‘Ying, don’t forget the f***ing hors d’oeuvres?'” In the end, though, she was glad things didn’t work out, adding: “If that writer didn’t have enough humor to appreciate that, then I shouldn’t have been working with her. It would have been a total disaster.”
