Thank You For Being A Friend - You’ll Be Missed

Golden Girls star Estelle Getty died in her Los Angeles home at 5:35 a.m. Tuesday morning.

Best known for portraying the witty Sophia Petrillo on the hit show “Golden Girls”, Getty, 84, died three days short of her 85th birthday. She had been struggling with illness and battling Lewy Body dementia for years.

Getty became a gay icon from her work in Torch Song Trilogy and Golden Girls. Her character of Sophia Petrillo was notoriously accepting of the gay community, including her cross-dressing son Phil and daughter Dorothy’s openly gay best-friend Jean. “Our mother-daughter relationship was one of the greatest comic duo’s ever, and I will miss her,” Bea Arthur commented in a statement released to E! Online.