From this morning’s Washington Post comes this sad news:
Don Knotts, the rail-thin comic actor who was perhaps best known to millions of television viewers as the bungling Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife in “The Andy Griffith Show” and the squirrelly landlord in “Three’s Company,” died of lung cancer Feb. 24 at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 81.
Mr. Knotts, who often played high-strung characters, won five Emmys for Best Supporting Actor in the 1960s as the swaggering but hapless Fife. Mr. Knotts developed the idea of the deputy sheriff when he heard that Andy Griffith, with whom he had worked in the play “No Time for Sergeants,” was putting together a TV pilot set in the fictional North Carolina town of Mayberry.
The series was a huge success when it aired, from 1960 to 1968, consistently ranking in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings.
Fife, who grew into one of the most beloved comic characters in American popular culture, generated sympathy and laughs in scenes in which he fumbled to load his service revolver with the single bullet Griffith allotted him.
“Don meant everything,” Griffith said in a telephone interview. “Don made the show. I’ve lost a lifetime friend.”
People my age are more likely to remember Ralph Furley than Barney Fife, but Knotts had made it clear on more than one ocassion that the bumbling deputy was his favorite character of all that he had done over his career. I wasn’t a Three’s Company fan when I was younger, but I loved the reruns of Andy Griffith that seemed to run several times a day in the New York area in the 1970s and 80s.
More at Outside the Beltway, Wizbang Pop! and Don Surber who also has this tribute with video.
