Blanche Devereaux

Infobox character


name = Blanche Devereaux
first = "The Engagement"
Last = "The Chicken and the Egg"
Cause =
Age = 47 [55 at end of series]
Born = May 15, 1930
Death = None
Occupation = Secretary at a Miami museum
family = Elizabeth and Curtis "Big Daddy" Hollingsworth (parents)
Virginia Hollingsworth, Charmaine Hollingsworth (sisters)
Tad Hollingsworth, Clayton Hollingsworth (brothers)
spouse = George Devereaux (deceased)
romances = Mel Bushman
Rex Hunnington
Kendell Nesbit Harry
children = Rebecca Devereaux
Janet Devereaux
Doug Devereaux
Matthew Devereaux
Biff Devereaux
Skippy Devereaux

relatives = David (grandson)
Melissa, Sarah, Aurora (granddaughters)
Lucas Hollingsworth (uncle)
Jamie Devereaux (brother-in-law)
Abernathy Hollingsworth (cousin)
Lucy (niece)
(Arlen) Second Cousin
(Lynette)|

Blanche Marie Elizabeth Hollingsworth Devereaux [Said by Blanche's old nanny in the episode "Wham, Bam, Thank You Mammy"] was one of the four main characters on the 1985-1992 NBC sitcom "The Golden Girls", and its CBS spin-off "The Golden Palace". In the pilot episode her last name was given as Hollingsworth, but this was somewhat "corrected" in later episodes by making this her maiden name. Blanche was portrayed by Rue McClanahan.

Childhood

Blanche grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Her parents were the late Elizabeth Ann Bennett Roquet (Helen Kleeb) and Curtis "Big Daddy" Hollingsworth (first Murray Hamilton, and after Hamilton died, David Wayne), the latter a revered man in his neck of the woods. Much to Blanche's dismay, he married a young widow named Margaret Spencer (Sondra Currie) 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 African-American 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 reluctance 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. Blanche also had a visit from her promiscuous niece, Lucy (played by Hallie Todd, later of Lizzie McGuire fame).

Love Life

For most of her life, she was married to high school sweetheart George Devereaux. From the back-story, he died a few years before the start of the series in 1985. In a 1990 episode, Blanche had a dream that George came back from the dead nine years later (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.)

During her senior year in high school, in 1949, she almost eloped with the father of her rival at cheerleading with the sole purpose of having her taken off the squad.

On the show, Blanche has been shown to have dated various men, some of them unsavory. She almost married a bigamist in the pilot episode before he got caught by the police. Another man stole her necklace at her full moon-leap year's party, and he too was caught by the police. One boyfriend named Rex was emotionally and verbally abusive, until her roommate Dorothy helped her see his true colors. Another boyfriend Gary (Jerry Hardin) cheated on her under her very roof by sleeping with Rose's sister Holly (Inga Swenson) who was visiting. Blanche overcame her apprehension of dating Ted, who is in a wheelchair, only to find out he is married, so she terminated the relationship based on the fact that she has never been the "other woman" in extramarital affairs. The only other time that occurred was when, through a bizarre turn-of-events, her beau's wife was revived by paramedics after she was declared dead. But Blanche has also ruined good relationships with worthy men: Jake (Donnelly Rhodes) wanted to marry her but she turned him down and regretted it later, and when Steven (Robert Mandan) was hospitalized, she refused to visit him until much later, by which time he reconciled with his ex-girlfriend.

On the show, Blanche is portrayed as a promiscuous woman, with her initials spelling out the word "BED." She spends a great deal of her time with members of the opposite sex, and this is a source of both condemnation from and amusement to her roommates. Blanche's seemingly liberated human sexual behavior was a contrast to the sexual climate of the 1980s, when AIDS was beginning to seep into a nation's consciousness. However, in the episode "72 Hours," it is mentioned that Blanche is cognizant of the dangers of HIV; she always uses protection and knows every lover's full sexual history.

Children

There are a total of six children mentioned between Blanche and her late husband George: two daughters (Janet and Rebecca, both of whom appeared in the series) and four sons (three of them—Biff, Doug, and Skippy—are mentioned in the episode "Bringing Up Baby," while the fourth, Matthew, is mentioned in the episode "To Catch a Neighbor" and makes an onscreen appearance on an episode of The Golden Palace, played by southern comic Bill Engvall). During the series, Blanche learns that George had a seventh child, a son named David, as the result of an affair.

During the course of the show, Blanche is revealed not to have been very 'hands-on' as a mother. She has a strained relationship with most of her children, especially daughter Janet, something that led to some of the most dramatic storylines as she expressed regrets that she wasn't there for her children more.

Prior to the series' beginning, Blanche had a falling out with her daughter Rebecca over Rebecca's decision to drop out of school to pursue a modeling career in Paris. When Rebecca returns, she is significantly overweight and engaged to an emotionally abusive man named Jeremy (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, Debra Engle), 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 her daughter 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 (Alan Rachins) 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 also has at least four grandchildren, David, Melissa, and Sarah (all born to Janet, who married a "Yankee"), as well as Rebecca's child, Aurora.

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 either 1932 or 1931, after the first week of May, and is about a year or two younger than Rose and Dorothy. That would make her 53 years old when the series began in 1985 and 60 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. She claimed in a third season episode that she was still capable of childbirth despite the fact that she had undergone menopause a full season beforehand, but Dorothy quickly shot down that claim.

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. And yet, both she and Dorothy at times isolate themselves from Rose, ganging up on her when the latter says anything particularly foolish, and taking turns hitting her on the head with a newspaper or magazine. Their relationship is also symbiotic: in one of the last episodes in the series, Dorothy admits that Blanche has helped her be comfortable with her own sexuality, while Dorothy herself has always served as Blanche's other voice of reason.

Blanche's 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. (In the very first episode of the series, Sophia had bluntly told Blanche, "You look like a prostitute.")

In an episode called "Yes, We Have no Havanas", Sophia and Blanche became rivals for the affections of an elderly Cuban gentleman named Fidel Santiago (Henry Darrow), and the two women 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." and a "wrinkled old crow". 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 had been romancing, except for Dorothy and Rose.

*It was revealed in the episode "Love Under the Big Top" that Blanche does not like tuna fish.