Betty White, the legendary television actress who started her career with unforgettable parts on “The Golden Girls” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and became a pop culture icon in her 80s and 90s, has died just weeks before her 100th birthday, according to reports.

TMZ reports she died in her sleep at home Friday morning, according to law enforcement sources.

A spokesperson for White did not respond to request for comment.

For 80 years, White (1899-1989) has held the record for the longest television career of any entertainer, making her debut in 1939 and continuing to act as a actress, host, and sought-after guest into her nineties.

But she’ll be best remembered for her hilarious, scene-stealing parts in two ground-breaking TV series: the promiscuous food show host Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s and Rose Nylund, a sweet simpleton, on The Golden Girls in the 1980s.

“One great character in their career is something,” Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University TV professor, told The Post.

“Those two shows are her major legacy, since they will continue to be watched. They’ve reached the status of classic.”

White was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on Jan. 17, 1922, to parents Tess and Horace White, an electrical engineer. Her dad is the son of one of the world’s first Black nuclear families – a single parent who raised him because he was blind from birth. A novice film producer in Los Angeles who worked with Charlie Chaplin.

The family relocated to California a few years later, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where the future star was raised in the shadow of Hollywood.

When she was cast in the lead role of a school production, she fell under the showbiz bug. She gained her first television job just a month after graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1939, performing “The Merry Widow” on an experimental local station.

The epiphany, which occurred months before the medium was made available to the general public at the New York World’s Fair, came in May 1904.

“Betty White’s television career goes all the way back, in a certain sense, before television. Nobody had a TV in 1939,” added Thompson.

During World War II, she took a break from the small screen to work with the American Women’s Voluntary Services and marry a fighter pilot named Dick Barker, but she resumed her career in 1948 with modest parts on a regional station.

By the time she was five years old, just over a thousand people in Los Angeles had a television, according to her 1995 autobiography.

White’s first major opportunity came when he hosted the daytime talk show “Hollywood on Television” — which filled five and a half hours of air time six days a week with freewheeling conversation, celebrity interviews, sketches, and live commercials.

The show was a success.

“It was between us and the test pattern,” White once remarked — but their marriage crumbled after two years when Lane Allen’s Hollywood agency partner didn’t accept being married to a working female.

In 1952, White co-created and starred in the popular Saturday-night program “Life with Elizabeth,” which made her one of television’s few female producers and earned her first Emmy nomination.

In 1954, she became the first woman to host her own television program in front of and behind the camera. With the short-lived NBC talk show “The Betty White Show,” she continued to break ground both on screen and behind it.

Over the inclusion of African-American tap dancer Arthur Duncan in the cast, certain stations in the South threatened to cancel the program, but White famously instructed them to “live with it.”

“She was probably one of the nicest, grandest, greatest people I’ve had the chance to meet in my life,” said Duncan in 2018. “Whenever she walked into a room, it lit up.”

During the 1960s, White became a regular guest on game shows, meeting her third and final husband, “Password” host Allen Ludden, who she remained with until his death in 1981.

In 1973, the already successful “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was searching for a Sue Ann Nivens character described in the script as an “icky-sweet Betty White type,” and accidentally hired the real thing.

“cloyingly sweet on the surface and something of a dragon underneath, with a tinge of nymphomania,” White said in her 1995 memoir. “I was born for the role!”

A personality like that was “a big deal” for the 1970s, according to Thompson.

“Sue Ann Nivens liked sex and performed activities that allowed her to fulfill her desires. In the 1970s, Betty White was doing what ‘Sex and the City’ wouldn’t do until the late 1990s: playing Sue Ann Nivens,” he added.

White won her first and second prime-time Emmy awards for producing the project.

She followed up the statue with a third when she was cast on NBC’s “The Golden Girls” in 1985.

Initially, White thought she would be playing Blanche Devereaux, the man-hungry lady of the “My Fair Lady” musical adaptation, but because it was too similar to her character on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” she was given Rose Nylund’s loveably dim-witted role.

According to Thompson, it was a brilliant idea.

“The way she could deliver that sort of naive ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ look whenever someone started talking about sex — but same time, we know she’s a widow,” he said.

“It was so much fun knowing who Betty White really is uttering those words.”

The ensemble comedy about four older ladies was an unlikely worldwide success, running for seven seasons and spawning a spin-off entitled “The Golden Palace.”

After leaving The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1977, White had a brief period as a regular on The Bold and the Beautiful (and later went on to star in her own spinoff). Tracing her career through more than four decades, we find that it was limited. She did not land any recurring roles until she was well into her 60s.

She also cultivated her twilight years, though, by becoming the best part of it: Betty White.

White became a popular personality again, this time as a larger-than-life version of herself cracking lewd remarks that younger guests would never be able to make.

“Betty White for the past 30 years has performed as a piece of performance art,” said Thompson.“

“You knew you were in for a treat if Betty White was on the calendar,” says DeFazio. “She got more television accepted more open discussion as she aged, and she became well-known for you may never know what will come out of her mouth.”

White’s popularity reached its zenith in 2010, when her backers launched a Facebook page called “Betty White to Host SNL (Please).” With almost 500,000 supporters, she became the oldest person to ever host the program at age 88, and she won her seventh Emmy for the performance.

She then went on to star in six seasons of TV Land’s “Hot in Cleveland,” and she hardly stopped when she was in her 90s, hosting pranks shows “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers” and “Betty White’s Smartest Animals in America,” where she was able to draw on her decades-long passion for animals

“I’m just happy to be working, and it all starts at the beginning,” White said in 2018, when she was 96.

“When you start out you’re so grateful to have a job … and you carry that feeling through your whole career. At least I have.”