Blanche Devereaux
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- For the 14th Century French princess, see Blanche d'Evreux
| Blanche Marie Elizabeth Deveraux | |
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| First appearance | "The Engagement" |
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| Year of birth | 1932 |
| Family | Elizabeth and Curtis "Big Daddy" Hollingsworth (parents) Virginia Hollingsworth, Charmaine Hollingsworth (sisters) Tad Hollingsworth, Clayton Hollingsworth (brothers) |
| Relationships | George Deveraux |
| Children | Rebecca Devereaux Janet Devereaux Skippy Devereaux Doug Devereaux Biff Devereaux Matthew Devereaux |
| Relatives | Lucas Hollingsworth (Big Daddy's brother) |
Blanche Marie Elizabeth Hollingsworth Devereaux was one of the four main characters on the 1985-1992 NBC sitcom The Golden Girls, and its CBS spin-off The Golden Palace.
Blanche was a Southern Belle, somewhat selfish and vain, with a seemingly endless list of paramours and stories of outlandish romantic escapades.
She was portrayed by Rue McClanahan, who won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy in 1986 for her performance.
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[edit] Family
Blanche grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Her parents were the late Elizabeth and Curtis "Big Daddy" Hollingsworth (Murray Hamilton), the latter a revered man in his neck of the woods. Much to Blanche's dismay, he slept with one of her former childhood friends (allegedly this was the friend's way of getting even with Blanche for ending the friendship because Mrs. Hollingsworth forbade Blanche to befriend someone whose mother was not a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy), and married a young widow named Margaret Spencer years after Elizabeth passed on. Blanche was not at Big Daddy's side when he died because she was attending a ball in Miami, but refused to go to his funeral because of an argument with her sister Virginia; Blanche regretted this afterward and resolved to try to rethink her priorities in life. After Big Daddy died, it was revealed that he and Blanche's long-lost black nanny (Ruby Dee) had an affair that lasted for fifty years.
Blanche has four siblings: Charmaine (Barbara Babcock), the eldest sister, who infuriates Blanche when she writes a sordid novel that Blanche thinks is about her. Virginia (Sheree North) is the spoiled youngest sister, with whom Blanche shared a mutual loathing. They buried the hatchet when Virginia went into renal failure and Blanche offered her kidney to her sister, but their relationship became strained once more after their argument after Big Daddy's death in which Virginia accused Blanche of being too selfish and self-centered to say goodbye to her own father. There was also Clayton (Monte Markham), a younger brother whose subsequent revelation as being gay troubled Blanche to some extent; Blanche's hesitance to accept Clayton's sexual orientation nearly cost her a relationship with him. During The Golden Palace, it is revealed that Blanche has a mentally challenged brother, Tad (Ned Beatty), who has spent most of his life in a Chattanooga institution. It was once revealed, when she was attempting to gain entry to the Daughters of the South, that she is 1/8 Jewish, her great-grandmother having been a Jewish woman named Feldman from Buffalo, New York.
[edit] Love Life
For most of her life, she was married to high school sweetheart George Devereaux (who had a younger brother, Jamie, who looked very much like him, and one episode had Blanche transferring her love of her husband to her brother-in-law). From the backstory, he died a few years before the start of the series. In a 1991 episode, Blanche had a dream that George came back from the dead (he said that he faked his death to escape criminal prosecution for fraud). Rue McClanahan has said that George was the love of Blanche's life, and that her promiscuity was in fact a desperate search for the next love of her life. However, in one episode, Blanche admitted that she was having a pedicure on the day of George's death, despite the fact that George was in a coma. (Yet in another episode, George died suddenly in an accident and she was at home when a police officer phoned her the news.)
On the show, Blanche Devereaux is portrayed as sexually liberated. Her entire life is based around pursuing men, and this is a source of both condemnation from and amusement to her roommates. Blanche's seemingly liberated sexuality was a contrast to the sexual climate of the 1980s, when AIDS was beginning to seep into a nation's consciousness.
[edit] Children
Blanche is revealed of the course of the show to have not been a very hands-on mother and she has a strained relationship with most of her children, something which led to some of the more dramatic storylines as she expressed regret that she wasn't there for her children more.
Continuity errors in the show have made it impossible to figure out just exactly who are Blanche's children. What is clear that she had two daughters, Janet and Rebecca, as both of them appeared in the show. What is unclear is how many sons Blanche had. At various times it is mentioned that she has sons named Matthew, Biff, Doug, and Skippy. However, it is unclear whether she did in fact have four sons, or if she had fewer; Biff and Skippy may have been the nicknames of Matthew and Doug. None of her sons appeared in the show, which makes it even harder to know for certain.
Blanche's daughter Rebecca ran away to Paris in pursuit of a modeling career but returned and was overweight and engaged to an emotionally abusive man named Jeremy, played by Joe Regalbuto. Blanche tried to convince Rebecca that Jeremy wasn't good enough for her, and Rebecca once again accused her mother of trying to control her life and stormed out, though she soon realized Blanche was right and again made peace with her.
Rebecca eventually lost the extra pounds and returned a few seasons later (played by a different actress), deciding that she wanted to have a baby through artificial insemination. Blanche made no secret of the fact that Rebecca's decision embarrassed her, and mother and daughter once again stopped speaking, until Blanche realized that her pride wasn't worth losing a relationship with Rebecca and the grandchild and decided to accept the decision.
Rebecca later gives birth to a daughter, Aurora (a name Blanche hates because it's not "musical" or "Southern" enough, in her estimation). Aurora is the catalyst of one more major conflict between Rebecca and Blanche, when Blanche meets a man named Jason while baby-sitting Aurora. Jason assumes that Blanche is Aurora's mother rather than grandmother, and Blanche is so flattered that she fails to correct him. When Jason finds out the truth, he breaks off the relationship, and Rebecca once again stops speaking to her mother, until Sophia convinces her to reconcile and not let Aurora grow up without a grandmother.
Blanche had long had a difficult relationship with her other daughter, Janet, but it improves slightly over the years as Blanche becomes more emotionally accessible.
Blanche also has at least four grandchildren, David, Melissa, and Sarah (born to Janet, who married a "Yankee"), as well as Rebecca's child, Aurora.
[edit] Age
Blanche is the youngest of the four women living in the house she owns. Although it is widely believed that her exact age was never revealed (Rose Nylund attempts to find out in one episode and learns that Blanche's record was "Deleted by Authority of the Governor"), in Season 3, Episode 25 entitled "Mother's Day" (Aired May 7, 1988), it is revealed in a flashback that Blanche was in fact 17 in 1949, meaning she was born in 1932 and is about a year or two younger than Rose and Dorothy Zbornak. That would make her 53 years old when the series began in 1985 and 61 when the spin-off ended in 1993. Although throughout the series, she usually claims to be in her forties (or even younger), the above episode, along with the ages of her children, and the fact that she entered menopause in the second season premiere (average age of menopause in the U.S. is 51) supports the above fact.
[edit] Relationship with her roommates
Blanche acts as co-roommate and landlord to Rose Nylund, Dorothy Zbornak, and Sophia Petrillo. Throughout the series, she and Rose are often involved in the same activities, be it auditioning for a play or doing community service projects. Though she is annoyed at times by Rose's constant storytelling, she sees her as both her best friend and a surrogate sister. To be sure, Blanche has her own collection of strange stories which she also shares from time to time, often tales of her rivalry with sisters Virginia and Charmaine or of the promiscuous stunts she pulled as a teenager.
Her relationship with Dorothy is mixed with envy and condemnation on both parts: Dorothy envies and condemns Blanche's sexual comfortability, while Blanche envies Dorothy's intelligence and condemns her fashion sense, among other things. Her relationship with Sophia is also interesting: Blanche sees her both as a mother figure and as a mean old lady, and Sophia sees her as one of her daughters and, very vocally, a streetwalker (and that's only a cleaned-up version of what she usually says).
In one episode, Sophia and Blanche became rivals for the affections of an elderly Cuban gentleman named Fidel Santiago, and traded particularly nasty insults with each other: Sophia called Blanche a "50-year-old mattress," and Blanche referred to Sophia as a "raisin in sneakers." The rivalry came to an abrupt end when Fidel died suddenly. As it turned out, Fidel was even more promiscuous than Blanche - the congregation at his funeral consisted entirely of women he'd been romancing (except for Dorothy and Rose, of course).
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| Main Characters: | Dorothy Zbornak | Rose Nylund | Blanche Devereaux | Sophia Petrillo |
| Recurring Characters: | Lucas Hollingsworth | Stanley Zbornak |
| Episodes: | List of The Golden Girls episodes |
| Spinoffs & Related Series: | The Golden Palace | Empty Nest | Nurses |
| Other: | Susan Harris | "Thank You for Being a Friend" |
