Bea Arthur is my hero - the gays loved her, still love her, and as long as The Golden Girls, Maude and All in the Family are on DVD, will always love her.
Bea loved the gays back - she generously left homeless gay teenagers $300,000!
The Ali Forney Center (AFC) is planning to name one of it's transitional residences in honor of Bea Arthur, as an expression of gratitude for Bea's extraordinary kindness and generosity to the homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth served by AFC.
The Ali Forney Center currently operates both emergency and transitional housing programs. The emergency housing program provides short-term shelter aimed at providing stability and guidance to youth suffering homelessness. The transitional housing program is aimed at providing longer-term housing for up to two years while residents pursue the educational and vocational goals that will allow them to live independent lives and overcome homelessness.
The Bea Arthur Residence will house 12 youths. $430K per year has been obtained from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to support it's operational funding. AFC is currently working with the Hudson Planning Group to secure government and private funds to support the acquisition of a building to provide this home. AFC is currently renting all of its transitional housing sites, and has secured a generous three year grant from the Oak Foundation to support its work with the Hudson Planning Group to purchase housing sites. AFC is currently working with Rapid Realty to identify sites in Brooklyn to purchase.
The Ali Forney Center aims to provide LGBT youth with the support and guidance that they should receive from their families. All youth residing in AFC's transitional housing program are required to find employment and finish high school. Youth are supported in pursuing higher education, and are required to save a portion of their incomes. Mental health counseling is offered to our residents to help them overcome the pain and confusion of having been rejected by their families because of their LGBT identities. An intensive Life Coaching program has been developed with dedicated volunteers who help mentor our youth in pursuing their career goals and aid them in developing the skills they need to live independently.
If you would like to support the Bea Arthur Residence CLICK HERE
'Golden Girls' star Bea Arthur leaves $300,000 in will to NY group that helps gay homeless youths
Bea Arthur left $300,000 in her will to a New York organization that aids homeless gay youth. The Ali Fornay Center provides services to more than 1,000 each year, and is planning to buy a building to house 12 young people - and name it in honor of the "Golden Girls" actress.
The head of the center said he is thrilled with the stage and television legend's generosity. "We work with hundreds of young people who are rejected by their families because of who they are," said Executive Director Carl Siciliano.
"We are overwhelmed with gratitude that Bea saw that LGBT youth deserve as much love and support as any other young person, and that she placed so much value in the work we do to protect them, and to help them rebuild their lives," he said.
The Ali Forney Center offers emergency shelter and transitional housing in seven residential sites in New York. It also operates two drop-in centers offering food, clothing, medical and mental health treatment, HIV testing, treatment and prevention services, and vocational and educational assistance.
Bea Arthur inspired many people, including artist John Currin. In 1991 John Currin painted "Bea Arthur Nude". I saw this painting at his solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2003.
Bea Arthur Nude (1991) - cropped by myself
Did Bea Arthur ever see this painting? If so, what did Bea think of this portrait? Was she flattered?
What does it feel like to have someone you've never met paint you nude, from their imagination? And, what would it feel like to see your imaginary breasts exhibited for the world to see at the Whitney Museum?
There are many things I'd have liked to ask Bea Arthur.
John Currin (born 1962) is an Americanpainter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body.
In New York City in 1989 he exhibited a series of portraits of young girls derived from the photographs in a high school yearbook, and initiated his efforts to distill art from traditionally clichéd subjects. In the 1990s, when political themed art works were favored, Currin brazenly used bold depictions of busty young women, mustachioed men and asexual divorcee's, setting him apart from the rest. He used magazines like Cosmopolitan along with old issues of Playboy for inspiration for his paintings. When criticized for being sexist, Currin did not deny it, but did remark that he felt that "at that time [he] didn't feel like a man and [he] didn't feel like a woman." In 1992 a subsequent exhibition focused, less sympathetically, on well-to-do middle-aged women. Nonetheless, by the late 1990s Currin's ability to paint subjects of kitsch with technical facility met with critical and financial success, and by 2003 his paintings were selling "for prices in the high six figures".More recently, he has undertaken a series of figure paintings dealing with unabashedly pornographic themes.
Currin is based in New York City, where he lives with his wife and fellow artist, Rachel Feinstein. John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, in the front row at Marc Jacobs Spring 2006 show:
Karen Rosenberg:You famously painted a topless portrait of Bea Arthur. Were you a big fan?
John Currin:Bea Arthur painting is from Maude, which I used to watch as a kid. In the eighties, I didn’t have TV for, like, a whole decade. When I started watching again in the nineties, The Golden Girls was in syndication. When I had a loft with Sean and Kevin Landers, we’d always take a break in the afternoon and watch The Golden Girls. When I made the painting, I was living in Hoboken and still making abstract paintings, and I was very frustrated. I was walking back from the PATH train and this vision of Bea Arthur just came to me.
ArtForum , Sept, 2003 by David Rimanelli Bea Arthur Naked, 1991, remains the most sensational of these pictures, and the best. The artist depicts the star of Maude, that '70s sitcom about an uppermiddle-class do-gooder, women's libber, and suburban wit--not Arthur's later incarnation in The Golden Girls. Naked, Arthur nevertheless remains composed and dignified, her smile and slightly peaked eyebrows conveying a sense of irony, even amusement. The portrait is too psychological for the everyday antifeminist caricature. And Currin's technique, stiff but more than adequate, dry but not fussy, betokens too much effort for the sake of mere snide laughter. Painted in the rapidly expanding '90s context of well-meaning art (the kind that Maude herself might collect were she part of the scene?), Bea Arthur Naked draws together multiple threads: the "incorrect" representation of women; the campy Pop aura of television sitcoms, perhaps a hang over from the '80s (think "Infotainment" and all those other group shows about a generation raised by the unwholesome light of the tube); and a commitment to figurative painting in the face of politicized art practices, the ever escalating fortunes of photography, and scatter and/or abject art. Perhaps Currin indulged in the last tendency somewhat, given his debased or pathetic subject matter and an impoverished or superannuated technique that savors more of the thrift-shop aesthetic than of the Old Masters.
The marquees of Broadway theaters will be dimmed for one minute on Tuesday at 8:00pm in honor of Bea Arthur, who died on Saturday. She was 86.
In 1966, Ms. Arthur won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for her performance as Vera Charles in the original Broadway production of “Mame.” Her other Broadway credits include “Plain and Fancy,” “Seventh Heaven” and “Nature’s Way;” she also played Yente the Matchmaker in the original 1964 production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and appeared in Woody Allen’s 1981 play “The Floating Lightbulb.” Her one-woman show “Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends” was nominated for Tony in 2002.
I believe that laughter is the best medicine. No matter what happens to me, as long as I have the ability to laugh, I am free. Bea Arthur brought me years of laughter, and freedom, and I will miss her very much.
Bea Arthur, who used her husky voice, commanding stature and flair for the comic jab to create two of the most endearing battle-axes in television history, Maude Findlay in the groundbreaking situation comedy “Maude” and Dorothy Zbornak in “The Golden Girls,” died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was coy about her age, and sources give various dates for her birth, but a family spokesman, Dan Watt, said in an e-mail message she was 86. The cause was cancer, Mr. Watt said.
Ms. Arthur received 11 Emmy Award nominations, winning twice — in 1977 for “Maude” and in 1988 for “The Golden Girls.”
She was a seasoned and accomplished theater actress and singer before she became a television star and a celebrity in midcareer, and she won a Tony Award in 1966 for playing Angela Lansbury’s best friend, the drunken actress Vera Charles, in “Mame.”
But while she was successful on stage, on television she made history. “Maude,” which was created by Norman Lear as a spinoff from “All in the Family,” was broadcast on CBS during the most turbulent years of the women’s movement, from 1972-78, and in the person of its central character, it offered feminism less as a cause than as an entertainment.
Maude Findlay was a woman in her 40s living in the suburbs with her fourth husband, Walter (played by Bill Macy), her divorced daughter, Carol (Adrienne Barbeau), and a grandson. An unabashed liberal, a bit of a loudmouth and a tough broad with a soft heart, she was, in the parlance of the time, a liberated woman, who sometimes got herself into trouble with boilerplate biases just the way her cultural opposite number, Archie Bunker, did. She was given a formidable physicality by Ms. Arthur, who was 5 feet 9 ½ inches and spoke in a distinctively brassy contralto.
The show was considered a sitcom, but like “All in the Family,” it used comedy to take on serious personal issues and thorny social ones — alcoholism, drugs, infidelity.
“We tackled everything except hemorrhoids,” Ms. Arthur said, sounding much like Maude, in a 2001 interview with the Archive of American Television, a collection of video oral histories compiled by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
In the show’s first season, Maude, at the age of 47, learned she was pregnant; her distress was evident.
“Mother, what’s wrong? You’ve got to share this with me,” Carol says. Maude’s response is typical, with barbs aimed both inward and outward, delivered by Ms. Arthur with a flash of simultaneous anger, despair and humor: “Honey, I’d give anything to share it with you.” The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.
“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”
“The Golden Girls,” an immensely popular show that was broadcast on NBC from 1985-92 and can still be seen daily in reruns, broke ground in another way. Created by Susan Harris (who wrote the “Maude” abortion episode), it focused on four previously married women sharing a house in Miami, and with its emphasis on decidedly older characters, it ran counter to the conventional wisdom that youthful sex appeal was the key to ratings success.
Which is not to say “The Golden Girls” wasn’t sexy. Like “Maude,” it was a comedy that dealt with serious issues, especially those involved with aging, but also matters like gun control, gay rights and domestic violence. And like “Maude,” it could be bawdy. The women were all active daters and, to different degrees, openly randy. As Dorothy, Ms. Arthur was coiffed and clothed in a softer, more emphatically feminine manner than she had been in “Maude,” but she was no less sharp-tongued, and she and the show’s other stars — Rue McClanahan, Betty White and Estelle Getty (who, though younger than Ms. Arthur, played Dorothy’s mother) — were frequently praised for portraying the lives of older women as lively, uncertain, dramatic and passion-filled as those of college sorority sisters.
Familiarly known as Bea, Ms. Arthur was billed in the theater and on television as Beatrice, but the name was one she made up. She was born Bernice Frankel in New York City on May 13, 1922, according to Mr. Watt. But she preferred to be called B — “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it,” she said — and later expanded it to Beatrice because, she said, she imagined it would look lovely on a theater marquee. The name Arthur is a modified version of the name of her first husband, the screenwriter and producer Robert Alan Aurthur.
When she was a child, her family moved to Cambridge, Md., on the Eastern Shore, where her parents ran a small women’s clothing store, and she dreamed of being a chanteuse and an actress, and entertained her friends with imitations of Mae West. She attended Blackstone College, a two-year school in Virginia, and later studied to be a medical technician, then eventually moved to New York to study acting with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. Among her classmates were Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau and the actor and director Gene Saks, whom she married in 1950. (He directed her in “Mame.”) They divorced in 1978; their two sons, Matthew and Daniel, survive her. She had two granddaughters.
Ms. Arthur worked regularly Off Broadway and in summer stock, appearing as Lucy Brown in Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of “The Threepenny Opera” at the Theater de Lys in 1954. And in 1955, in a well-received musical tidbit, “Shoestring Revue,” she was seen for the first time by the man who would become a lifelong friend and professional benefactor, Norman Lear.
She also sang in nightclubs and worked occasionally on television, appearing on “Kraft Television Theater” and other shows featuring live drama. On Broadway, in 1964, she played Yente, the matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the movies, she appeared in the comedy “Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970), and in a reprise of her stage performance as Vera Charles, she appeared in “Mame” (1974), again directed by her husband, this time alongside Lucille Ball.
In 1971, she was living in New York but visiting her husband, who was directing a movie, “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” in Los Angeles, when Mr. Lear persuaded her to do a guest spot on “All in the Family.” The role he created for her, Maude Findlay, was a cousin of Edith Bunker, Archie’s wife (Jean Stapleton), who arrives to care for the family when everyone gets sick. Her tart sparring with Archie (Carroll O’Connor, with whom she had worked on stage, in a play called “Ulysses in Nighttown”) was a hit with viewers. Almost immediately CBS ordered up a new series from Mr. Lear, with Ms. Arthur’s Maude at the center of it. It changed her life.
“I think we made television a little more adult,” Ms. Arthur said. “I really do.”
