Personal Life
Arthur was married twice. Her first marriage took place during her time in the military, when she married fellow Marine Robert Alan Aurthur (see Early life, above), a screenwriter, television, and film producer and director, whose surname she took and kept (though with a modified spelling). Shortly after they divorced, she married director Gene Saks from 1950 to 1980 with whom she adopted two sons, Matthew (born in 1961), an actor, and Daniel (born in 1964), a set designer.
In 1972, she moved to the Greater Los Angeles Area and sublet her apartment on Central Park West in New York City and her country home in Bedford, New York.
Arthur was a committed animal rights activist and frequently supported People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals campaigns. Arthur joined PETA in 1987 after a Golden Girls anti-fur episode. Arthur wrote letters, made personal appearances and placed ads against the use of furs, foie gras, and farm animal cruelty by KFC suppliers. In Norfolk, Virginia near the site of the PETA headquarters, there is a dog park named Bea Arthur Dog Park in her honor.
Arthur's longtime championing of civil rights for women, the elderly, and the Jewish & LGBT communities—in her two television roles and through her charity work and personal outspokenness—has led her to be cited as an LGBT icon.
Read more about this topic: Bea Arthur
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I found my brother’s body at the bottom there, where they had thrown it away on the rocks, by the river. Like an old, dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead. And I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up.... Because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended one way or another. And I decided to help.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)