Betty White’s five favourite movies
Betty White was a pioneer of early television series and enjoyed a career spanning over seven decades before she died on New Year’s Eve in 2021. White was celebrated as one of the first women to have a significant role both in front of and behind the camera.
In 2009, White named her five favourite films as part of a feature with Rotten Tomatoes. Her first pick helped her decide that she wanted to be in the film industry. Naughty Marietta is a 1935 musical romance based on Victor Herbert’s 1910 operetta of the same name. Discussing the film’s impact on her life, White said: “I was 14, and I was so in love with Nelson Eddy I thought it was the end of the world, and I didn’t just like Jeanette MacDonald, I was Jeanette MacDonald! I think I saw Naughty Marietta 48 times. I wasn’t even interested in show business until then; I did school plays and that kind of thing, but I hadn’t thought of it as a career until I got hooked.”
A much later film that White admires is Sydney Pollack’s 1985 picture Out of Africa, based loosely on Karen Blixen’s autobiographical book of the same name, in which she details the 17 years in which she lived in Kenya. White said of the film adaptation: “I think it’s one of the love stories of the world. The music – I think it’s the most evocative score in the world; it’s just so beautiful.”
Going back to the 1930s again, White revisits another of her favourite classics, Lost Horizon, directed by Frank Capra. White explained the inspiration for the film and her love for it: “It’s a James Hilton book; Frank Capra made the first one, and they remade it. It’s set up in the Andes, where Shangri-La is a valley unlike any place on earth. Jane Wyatt and Ronald Coleman starred in the first one. Again, it’s terribly romantic; I’m a romantic nut!”
Indeed, it appears that White is a romance nut, which makes her next choice make even more sense: Clint Eastwood’s 1995 film The Bridges of Madison County, which details an intense love affair between a young photojournalist and an Italian war bride. White said of the film: “It’s that lovely, warm love story with a sadness at the end that just stays with you.”
Betty White’s five favourite movies:
- Naughty Marietta (Robert Z. Leonard & W.S. Van Dyke, 1935)
- Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985)
- Lost Horizon (Frank Capra, 1937)
- The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995)
- Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979)
Round off her list of favourite films is 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer, directed by Robert Benton. The film strays from the other selections on the list in that it is a legal drama rather than a romantic one, although, like The Bridges of Madison County, it also features Meryl Streep. Discussing Streep’s impact, White said, “It was seeing Meryl Streep for the first time, seeing that performance. You don’t often see somebody just come out from the screen, grab you by the shoulders, and bring you back in. I think it was that that got me about it.”
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