Los Angeles, June 3 (DPA) Actress Rue McClanahan, who starred as an ageing, sex-obsessed southern belle in the hit comedy series ‘The Golden Girls’, has died aged 76.

Her manager, Barbara Lawrence, told People magazine that she died in a New York hospital Thursday morning after suffering a ‘massive stroke’.

McClanahan won an Emmy award in 1977 as the year’s outstanding comic actress for her role in ‘Golden Girls’, a sitcom about four middle-aged women sharing an apartment in Miami.

Born in Oklahoma in 1934 she had been married six times.