It’s been announced today that legendary US actress Beatrice Arthur, star of The Golden Girls, has died at the age 86.

A family spokesman told the Associated Press that Bea had cancer and had “died peacefully” at her home in Los Angeles.

Bea’s best-known roles were in popular sitcoms such as Maude and, as mentioned, as Dorothy in The Golden Girls. During her long career, Bea achieved five Emmy nominations and one win.

In a 2005 interview with EW.com, Bea recalled how she “flipped” when she first read the script for The Golden Girls…

“After all of the crap I’d been sent, here was something so bright and adult and fabulously funny” she said. And what a great job she did of playing the sarcastic, witty and long-suffering daughter Dorothy…

Bea’s long-time friend, Billy Goldenberg, told EW.com that the actress was “never afraid to say anything that she believed in. The rest of us always took a moment before we said anything, maybe edited it…

“But she never did. And that was rather odd, because she was a very shy, private person.”

Here’s a clip from her in Golden Girls in which her real-life adopted son Daniel guest starred as one of the police officers. He’s the shorter one of the two ‘officers’…

What a loss – she was a wonderful actress.