Casting
The role of Sue Ann Nivens was not specifically written for White, but script #73 of the series ("The Lars Affair", originally aired September 15, 1973) called for an "icky sweet Betty White type". The show's casting director decided to approach the star herself, who with her then husband Allen Ludden was already good friends with Mary Tyler Moore and her then husband, the show's producer Grant Tinker. (In a 2011 Archive of American Television interview, Moore explained that producers, aware of Moore and White's friendship, were initially hesitant to audition White for the role, the fear being that if she hadn't been right, that it would create awkwardness between the two.) In playing Sue Ann, the actress played up this image as a contrasting cover for a backbiting, sexually voracious nature. This first appearance was in the sitcom's fourth season.
Read more about this topic: Sue Ann Nivens
Famous quotes containing the word casting:
“This I do know and can say to you: Our country is in more danger now than at any time since the Declaration of Independence. We don’t dare follow the Lindberghs, Wheelers and Nyes, casting suspicion, sowing discord around the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. We don’t want revolution among ourselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“All we know
Is that we are a little early, that
Today has that special, lapidary
Todayness that the sunlight reproduces
Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe
Sidewalks. No previous day would have been like this.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgement shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision.”
—Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)