“Bea Arthur comes in and she’s a force of nature,” Struthers told the hosts. She remembered that before filming an episode, the cast would do a run-through for the producers and network people. “Sometimes they’d look up. But you couldn’t count on them for a lot of laughs ’cause they were too busy making sure we said the words that were on the page.”
But Arthur was “filthier than a drunken sailor” and “put all sorts of expletives in her lines to shock these men,” the actress shared. Arthur ended up starring as Maude in an eponymous All in the Family spin-off before joining Golden Girls.
Struthers also told the hosts that she would often run into Arthur at the grocery store and end up laughing with her in the aisles. “She would trash everyone we ever knew,” the actress remembered. “I loved how filthy she was.”
Struthers, who won two Emmys for All in the Family, most recently starred in A Man on the Inside with Ted Danson. She also starred as Babette on Gilmore Girls and has worked widely as a voice actress on series including Dinosaurs and TaleSpin, in addition to a recent theatrical production of An Old-Fashioned Family Murder.