Standing 5-feet-9 and endowed with a booming voice, Bea Arthur is a commanding presence. “People see me and automatically think of me as composed and in control,” the actress contends. It’s certainly an image Arthur has projected on TV, first in CBS’s Maude back in the 1970s, and nowadays on The Golden Girls, NBC’s Saturday night hit sitcom (9 P.M. [ET]) about four older, single women living together. Arthur plays Dorothy, the sensible one.

Away from the camera, however, it’s another matter. “She’s a very different person from any character I’ve ever seen her play,” says her friend of 17 years and Golden Girls co-star, Rue McClanahan (Blanche). Offstage, Arthur is warm, caring, private and shy.

Her shyness, says Arthur, stems from growing up tall and growing up poor, a child of the Depression. “I think that I was 5-7 when I was 5 years old,” she says. “I cannot remember a day when people didn’t say to me, ‘How’s the weather up there? It causes you to be perceived as something other than what you are.

“I was an unhappy child, coming from a very small Tidewater town in Maryland, and I couldn’t wait to get on-stage. A lot of theater people are people who were misfits, people dissatisfied with their own lives, It’s that old classic thing, that being an actress allows you to trascend the shyness, to step onto a stage and do and be anything you want to be.”

At one time, Arthur aspired to a career as a nightclub singer, but gave it up for acting after a club owner told her that because of her height, she wasn’t believable as a singer of vulnerable, feminine lyrics.

She was married for almost 30 years to Broadway and film director Gene Saks, with whom she has two grown sons. She and Saks were divorced 12 years ago. Since then, the 60ish Arthur has all but given up on dating: “At my age, it’s very difficult to find any kind of romantic involvement because most men are either gay or married. I mean, how do you go about it? I met a very attractive man on an airplane and we chatted and we agreed to meet for a date, and then I thought, my God, have I lost my mind? Arranging a date with somebody I met on an airplane? I canceled it.”

During the seven months of the year she’s taping The Golden Girls, “I just go to work and then go home,” she says. “I have a beautiful house, I have my animals, I go home and stay there.” During the five months of hiatus, she travels. She likes her life the way it is, and can’t imagine trading her freedom and privacy for the communal living that’s depicted on The Golden Girls. “I’d never be living like that in a house with a group of women,” she says emphatically. “No way. None of us would. This is pure fairy tale.”

Fairy tale or not, the series does offer a distinctively different look at older women. Arthur says that at first she hadn’t realized that: “I never thought—well, these are older women. But I realize now that it has changed the image of older women, in that we all have our own teeth, and we’re all healthy and cute, and like to go to bed with men, which I don’t think has ever been portrayed before.”

Unlike other series that feature an ensemble of strong-willed females (CBS’s Designing Women comes to mind), The Golden Girls has never made headlines with stories about inflated egos or strife on the set. Arthur insists, “We simply have too much respect for each other’s talent for our egos to get in the way. There’s no room for that. You hear about how on other shows, actresses actually count their lines and complain that so-and-so got more lines this week. That’s just inconceivable on this show.”

But the Golden Girls, it seems, no matter how mature, are not beyond a bit of feminine vanity: Arthur coyly refuses to divulge her age. “We all decided immediately that we never would, because if one of us tells her age, then the others all have to talk about it. I will tell you this, “ she says, getting in the last word: “I’m the only one in the group who doesn’t dye her hair.”