LOS ANGELES — Estelle Getty, whose acting career bloomed late in life with her Emmy-winning performance as Sophia Petrillo, the wise-cracking mother of Bea Arthur on the popular NBC sitcom “The Golden Girls,” died Tuesday. She was 84.

Getty, who also won notice for her performance on Broadway as Harvey Fierstein’s mother in “Torch Song Trilogy,” died at her home in Hollywood, her friend and caretaker, Paul Chapdelaine, said. Getty had been battling Lewy body dementia for the past eight or nine years, he said.

“The only comfort at this moment is that although Estelle has moved on, Sophia will always be with us,” Betty White, one of Getty’s “Golden Girls” co-stars, said in a statement.

Getty was a veteran stage actress in New York City when she came to Los Angeles for the West Coast run of “Torch Song” in 1985, and her managers urged her to try making it in Hollywood. She told them she’d give it two months.

Six weeks later, she landed the part of Sophia, an elderly mother who was forced to live with her divorced middle-aged daughter and her daughter’s two friends in a house in Miami.

Though about the same age as Arthur, Getty put on a wig, makeup and dowdy clothes and for seven years engaged in hilarious verbal combat with her TV daughter, Dorothy Zbornak, who towered over the tiny but feisty Sophia.

“Our mother-daughter relationship was one of the greatest comic duos ever, and I will miss her,” Arthur said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Freed from normal social constraints by a mild stroke, Sophia had many of the show’s funniest lines, made even more droll by Getty’s deadpan delivery.

Getty, a natural comedienne famous for her one-liners even in private life, played Sophia for laughs, but she also brought depth to the character. It was her idea that Sophia would always carry a purse because, she said, older women are forced to shed so many possessions in their later years that everything they own ends up in their purses.

“Nobody puts down their life very easily,” she explained in a 1992 interview with Newsday.

In 1988, the year she won an Emmy for her performance as Sophia, Getty told the Los Angeles Times that she did not know what made her character so popular, but she thought it had something to do with her being so small.