A salute to Betty White on her 96th birthday

LOS ANGELES - Happy birthday to Betty White -- the nation’s most beloved (and precocious) nonagenarian. As she turns 96 years old, we celebrate and salute her!

What’s her secret? She’s long advocated having a passion...and hot dogs and vodka.

This Emmy award-winning TV legend (who is also one of the first female producers in Hollywood) is best known for playing the perky, yet sardonic Sue Ann Nevins on Mary Tyler Moore and the hopelessly sweet and naive Rose Nylund on the Golden Girls. 

In 1995, she was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, but had an amazing career resurgence 15 years later after she received the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. 

Thanks to an internet campaign, she was soon hosting SNL, which won her another Emmy. She became a regular on the show Hot in Cleveland and in 2012, won a Grammy for the spoken word recording of her book “If You Ask Me (And Of Course You Won't).”

Also a fierce advocate for animals, she has worked with the Los Angeles Zoo and the Morris Animal Foundation for more than four decades. White told the Hollywood Reporter, "I have to keep acting so that I can afford to keep doing my charity work!" 

But what’s her favorite perk about her age? 

“Best thing about being in your 90s is you’re spoiled rotten. Everybody spoils you like mad and they treat you with such respect because you’re old. Little do they know, you haven’t changed.”

Betty, we hope you never do change! Happy birthday!