Estelle Getty started acting when she was just 5 years old, but she was in her sixties before she became an international television star, as one of the four principals in the popular American sitcom The Golden Girls (1985-92).

Uniquely, the series starred four elderly women and the storylines and jokes revolved around medical conditions and other aspects of ageing. Getty played the oldest of the four — the diminutive, sharp-tongued Sophia Petrillo who moves into a Florida bungalow with her bossy daughter Dorothy (Beatrice Arthur), the dopey Rose (Betty White) and the sexually voracious Blanche (Rue McClanahan).

The series was noted for the finely delineated characters and the crisp repartee, particularly between the mother and daughter played by Getty and Arthur. It was testimony to Getty’s skills as an actress that the relationship was so convincing when in reality she was a year younger than the woman playing her daughter.

Between 1986 and 1992 Getty was nominated for an Emmy as Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy series for a remarkable seven successive years, winning once, in 1988. Her success on the series opened doors to other screen roles, often as mothers. She was Cher’s mother and Eric Stoltz’s grandmother in the 1985 weepie Mask and Barry Manilow’s mother in the 1985 TV movie Copacabana, and she co-starred with Sylvester Stallone in the comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992).

“I’ve played mothers to heroes and mothers to zeros,” she wrote in her autobiography If I Knew Then What I Know Now . . . So What? (1988). “I’ve played Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Southern mothers, New England mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. I’ve played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun.”

Nevertheless, Getty maintained, with some justification, that The Golden Girls did help to broaden Hollywood’s attitudes towards older people. “Before, every single older person was a mother or a grandmother. Now there are neighbours, secretaries and people who have jobs who are older people. You see roles they’ve never been allowed in before.”

She was born Estelle Scher into a Jewish-Polish immigrant family in the Lower East Side of New York in 1923 and showed an early interest in performing. By the age of 5 she was studying acting, singing and dancing. In her teens she acted in Yiddish theatre and also worked as a comedienne in the Borscht Belt resorts of the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.

Her parents worked in the glass business and she put her showbusiness career on hold in her early twenties when she was married to Arthur Gettleman, who sold glass, and they had two children. Subsequently she resumed acting and appeared in numerous stage productions in New York and elsewhere, though she also worked in various office jobs.

She was in her late fifites by the time she started appearing in films and on television. She had a small role in the Oscar-winning comedy Tootsie (1982), credited simply as “middle-aged woman”. That same year she attracted attention and glowing reviews as the overbearing Jewish mother Mrs Beckoff in the hit Broadway play Torch Song Trilogy with Harvey Fierstein. Anne Bancroft played the character in the 1988 film.

Her career was beginning to accelerate when she auditioned for The Golden Girls. She was appearing in the Los Angeles production of Torch Song Trilogy at the time. But the other three main actresses all had considerably more TV experience and the producers had serious reservations about whether Getty could play a woman who was 20 years older than she was.

Going up for a third test, she supposedly told the make-up artist: “To you, this is just a job. To me it’s my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80.” She pulled it off and her portrayal of the feisty Sophia proved so popular that she was expanded into a major character.

She also appeared in the sequel The Golden Palace (1992-93), in which Blanche, Rose and Sophia open a hotel, and played Grandma Little in the hit children’s film Stuart Little (1999).

In recent years she had suffered from Lewy body dementia, a condition with similarities to Parkinson’s disease. Her husband predeceased her and she is survived by their two sons.

Estelle Getty, actress, was born on July 25, 1923. She died on July 22, 2008, aged 84