By Melanie Linn Gutowski

Somehow, no matter what role she's playing, she just seems like everybody's Aunt Betty.

Betty White, a television star since the medium's earliest days, is best known to audiences for her roles as sexpot Sue Ann Nivens on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and as silly Scandinavian Rose Nylund on "The Golden Girls."

While the Emmy-winning actress has played mothers and grandmothers on television and in films, White never had children of her own.  In her mid-20s and her second marriage, White came to the realization that having children just wasn't in her future.

"I knew that I wasn't going to be content to just stay home, and I knew that a career was very much in my future, and there was a little jealousy [on the part of second husband Lane Allen]," White told Lifetime's Intimate Portrait.  

"So, finally I said 'No,' and he wanted to have a family, naturally. If I did have a baby, that baby would have to be the whole thing for me and that's not my field of expertise, so I decided not to have children. And in those days, people didn't understand that as readily as they do now."  

White and Allen divorced after less than a year of marriage, and she threw herself back into her passions, television and animal welfare, becoming a leader in both fields. She later found true love with third husband Allen Ludden, simultaneously becoming stepmother to his three children.

White's other passion, since childhood, has been animals.  She is actively involved with the Los Angeles Zoo and was recently recognized with the Morris Animal Foundation award.

"I'm the luckiest person in the world," White told TVGuide.com last year. "My life is divided in absolute half: half animals, half show business."

The show business half certainly has been busy lately. Recent appearances in a Super Bowl commercial and in comedies such as "The Proposal" are introducing White to a new audience. A recent grassroots Facebook campaign has White's fans lobbying for her to host "Saturday Night Live," and as it turns out, the campaign succeeded. White confirmed that she will indeed be hosting the famed comedy show.

Whether known to her fans as Betty, "Rose," "Sue Ann" or "Grandma Annie," White appreciates her widening intergenerational fan base.

"Teenagers, or 20-year-olds or the little ones say, 'Oh it's Wose!'," White says. "They can't say it yet, but they know who 'Wose' is."

Photo: TBO.com

Melanie Linn Gutowski is a freelance writer and a proud Godmother.