Blanche Elizabeth Devereaux (ne้ Hollingsworth) is one of the four main characters on the 1985-1992 NBC sitcom the Golden Girls. She was portrayed by Rue McClanahan, who won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy in 1986 for her performance.
On the show, Blanche Devereaux is portrayed as a slut. Her entire life is based around pursuing men, and this is a source of both condemnation from and amusement to her roommates. Blanche's seemingly liberated sexuality was a contrast to the sexual climate of the 1980s, when AIDS was beginning to seep into a nation's consciousness.
This isn't to say that Blanche's life has been a constant orgy. For most of her life, she was married to high school sweetheart George Devereaux. From the backstory, he died a few years before the start of the series, though in a 1991 episode, Blanche had a dream that George came back from the dead (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 perceived promiscuity was in fact a desperate search for the next love of her life.
Blanche grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Her parents were the late Elizabeth and Curtis "Big Daddy" Hollingsworth, the latter a revered man in his neck of the woods. Much to Blanche's dismay, he slept with one of her friends in childhood, and married a young widow named Margaret Spencer years after Elizabeth passed on. After he died, it was revealed that he and Blanche's long-lost mammy had an affair that lasted for fifty years. In addition, Blanche has three siblings: Charmaine, a novelist whose lifestyle mirrored Blanche's much to their chagrin; Virginia, who in one episode asked for Blanche's kidney; and Clayton, whose coming out and subsequent engagement to a cop named Doug would anger Blanche.
Blanche's children are a mixture of pride and shame for them. Continuation errors in the show have made it impossible to figure out just exactly who are all the Devereaux children, but two of them have been mentioned in full: Rebecca, who ran away to pursue a modeling career and came back heavier and with an abusive fiance, and who had a baby out of artificial insemination, and Janet, who was never seen but who had a turbulent relationship with her mother.
Blanche acts as co-roommate and landlord to Rose Nylund , Dorothy Zbornak , and Sophia Petrillo. Throughout the series, both she and Rose are involved in the same activity, 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. 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. Her relationship with Sophia is also interesting: Blanche sees her as a mother figure and as a mean old bitch, and Sophia sees her as one of her daughters and, very vocally, a streetwalker (and that's only a cleaned-up version of what she usually says).
