If you wanted to work with the great Betty White At any point in her extraordinary 70-plus-year career, it was best to offer her a television appearance. Beginning with the talk show “Hollywood on Television” in 1949, White made her home on the small screen and in the living rooms of America through sitcoms, game shows and appearances on late-night shows like “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” White was a delightful presence with killer comedy timing, her secret weapon being that goofy personality that often brimmed with surprisingly simmering wit. You never knew what would come out of White’s mouth, and that made her one of the medium’s most unlikely stars (despite her presence). was once ratings poison for “Bones”).
That’s not to say White hasn’t made films. Her first known appearance came in 1962, when she played a U.S. senator from Kansas in Otto Preminger’s great Advise and Consent. It wasn’t until the 1998 action film “Hard Rain” that she returned to the cinema and began to work more frequently in feature films, mostly in smaller supporting roles.
Interestingly, there was an offer on the table for her to return to the cinema early in a high-profile Jack Nicholson comedy, but she turned it down for a rather hairy reason.
Betty White wouldn’t be in anything that made jokes about animal cruelty
During one of her many appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, White revealed that she had been offered a role in the Oscar-winning series James L. Brooks film “As Good as It Gets.” That would have brought her back to the cinema two years before Hard Rain, but that wasn’t because White rejected a nasty gag in the script. As White told Leno, “They had this adorable dog in it, but in one scene the guy walks down the hallway and throws the dog down the trash chute.”
What was White’s specific problem with this joke? “Of course it ends up on some pillows and it’s fine,” she said. “But I didn’t want to make that example because you never know what crazy people or what kids will see it and think I can do it. The director said, ‘The dog is fine, the dog is fine!’ But I said, ‘I just can’t do that’.”
White admitted she may have made a career mistake by refusing a hit, but she had no regrets. And that shouldn’t be a surprise, as White was a well-known advocate for the Los Angeles Zoo and the American Humane Society. Even a silly, seemingly harmless part like the garbage chute scene in “As Good as It Gets” was a no-go for White.
