Don Knotts has died at 81

[tamra]

Actor Don Knotts dies at 81
Made a career of playing bumbling nerds like the iconic Deputy Barney Fife

Updated: 6:00 p.m. ET Feb. 25, 2006

LOS ANGELES - Don Knotts, the skinny, lovable nerd who kept generations of television audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on “The Andy Griffith Show,” has died. He was 81.

Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs “The Andy Griffith Show,” and another Knotts hit, “Three’s Company.”

Unspecified health problems had forced him to cancel an appearance in his native Morgantown, W.Va., in August 2005.

The West Virginia-born actor’s half-century career included seven TV series and more than 25 films, but it was the Griffith show that brought him TV immortality and five Emmys.

The show ran from 1960-68, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series in TV history to bow out at the top: The others are “I Love Lucy” and “Seinfeld.” The 249 episodes have appeared frequently in reruns and have spawned a large, active network of fan clubs.

No. 1, with one bullet
As the bug-eyed deputy to Griffith, Knotts carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.

Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and doesn’t mind being remembered that way.

His favorite episodes, he said, were “The Pickle Story,” where Aunt Bea makes pickles no one can eat, and “Barney and the Choir,” where no one can stop him from singing.

“I can’t sing. It makes me sad that I can’t sing or dance well enough to be in a musical, but I’m just not talented in that way,” he lamented. “It’s one of my weaknesses.”

Knotts appeared on six other television shows. In 1979, Knotts replaced Norman Fell on “Three’s Company,” playing the would-be swinger landlord to John Ritter, Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt.

Early in his TV career, he was one of the original cast members of “The Steve Allen Show,” the comedy-variety show that ran from 1956-61. He was one of a group of memorable comics backing Allen that included Louis Nye, Tom Poston and Bill “Jose Jimenez” Dana.

G-rated family films
Knotts’ G-rated films were family fun, not box-office blockbusters. In most, he ends up the hero and gets the girl — a girl who can see through his nervousness to the heart of gold.

In the part-animated 1964 film “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” Knotts played a meek clerk who turns into a fish after he is rejected by the Navy.

When it was announced in 1998 that Jim Carrey would star in a “Limpet” remake, Knotts responded: “I’m just flattered that someone of Carrey’s caliber is remaking something I did. Now, if someone else did Barney Fife, THAT would be different.”

In the 1967 film “The Reluctant Astronaut,” co-starring Leslie Nielsen, Knotts’ father enrolls his wimpy son — operator of a Kiddieland rocket ride — in NASA’s space program. Knotts poses as a famous astronaut to the joy of his parents and hometown but is eventually exposed for what he really is, a janitor so terrified of heights he refuses to ride an airplane.

In the 1969 film “The Love God?,” he was a geeky bird-watcher who is duped into becoming publisher of a naughty men’s magazine and then becomes a national sex symbol. Eventually, he comes to his senses, leaves the big city and marries the sweet girl next door.

He was among an army of comedians from Buster Keaton to Jonathan Winters to liven up the 1963 megacomedy “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Other films include “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966); “The Shakiest Gun in the West,” (1968); and a few Disney films such as “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” (1974); “Gus,” (1976); and “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo,” (1977).

In 1998, he had a key role in the back-to-the-past movie “Pleasantville,” playing a folksy television repairman whose supercharged remote control sends a teen boy and his sister into a TV sitcom past.

To the Big Apple with a C-note
Knotts began his show biz career even before he graduated from high school, performing as a ventriloquist at local clubs and churches. He majored in speech at West Virginia University, then took off for the big city.

“I went to New York cold. On a $100 bill. Bummed a ride,” he recalled in a visit to his hometown of Morgantown, where city officials renamed a street for him in 1998.

Within six months, Knotts had taken a job on a radio Western called “Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders,” playing a wisecracking, know-it-all handyman. He stayed with it for five years, then came his series TV debut on “The Steve Allen Show.”

He married Kay Metz in 1948, the year he graduated from college. The couple had two children before divorcing in 1969. Knotts later married, then divorced Lara Lee Szuchna.

In recent years, he said he had no plans to retire, traveling with theater productions and appearing in print and TV ads for Kodiak pressure treated wood.

The world laughed at Knotts, but it also laughed with him.

He treasured his comedic roles and could point to only one role that wasn’t funny, a brief stint on the daytime drama “Search for Tomorrow.”

“That’s the only serious thing I’ve done. I don’t miss that,” Knotts said.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11566794/ - MSNBC.com story w/pics '

[bingolong]

astonamous,
Damn Barney is gone.....hope they do a big marathon of Andy Griffith on TV Land or something.I can't front this is one of my fav shows

Don Knotts: 1924-2006
Don Knotts, the irrepressible comic actor who won five Emmys as Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, died Friday night in Los Angeles; he was 81. Knotts died of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, and had recently suffered health problems that kept him from making an appearance at his hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia, last August. Knotts started out in entertainment as a ventriloquist before returning to college and then enlisting in the army at the onset of World War II. After the war and college, he returned to New York and pursued a career in radio and television; he nabbed a part as a psychiatrist in the Broadway play No Time for Sergeants, which starred actor Andy Griffith. He reprised his role in the film version, and after moving to Los Angeles, was cast opposite Griffith in the actor's eponymous sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show. The show ran from 1960-1968, and Knotts won an unprecedented five Best Supporting Actor Emmys in a row as manic deputy Barney Fife, a role for which he would forever be identified. After leaving the show, Knotts embarked on a film career, appearing in family-friendly films such as The Incredible Mr. Limpet, The Reluctant Astronaut and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, among others. His career in the 70s was marked primarily by Disney films such as The Apple Dumpling Gang and No Deposit, No Return, until he joined the sitcom Three's Company in the middle of the show's run as the bumbling landlord Mr. Furley, forever interfering in his tenant's lives. After Three's Company, Knotts made innumerable appearances in television shows and occasionally films; one of his most notable recent roles was as a mysterious television repairman who sets strange events in motion in the film Pleasantville. Knotts was married twice, to Kay Mets from 1948-1969, with whom he had two children, and to Lara Lee Szuchna from 1974 to 1983. --Prepared by IMDb staff

[JTF]

bingolong,

[chevyt454]

Gonna watch "Incredible Mr. Limpett" in his honer.

[bcddjjsc690]

bingolong,
It was a great show and he was a excellent comedic actor ,
the barney fife character should be in the smithsonian ,
the modern version would be steve irkel for all you youngins'

But the older I get the more it bothers me that they filmed this show from 1960-1968 in North Carolina and it never had NOT ONE black actor on it, ever.! Who possibly could go thru any part of a back woods country town in the south like Mayberry and not see ONE black .

RIP Mr Knotts , " nip it ,nip it ,nip it ,nip it " One last time

[tamra]

chevyt454,

hey I just noticed "fresh meat" in the house. how are you chevyt? good to see ya

[bcddjjsc690]

tamra ,

He's been a member 7 months longer than you ...


[/i]fresh meat [/i]

guess that makes you a "newbie"

[tamra]

bcddjjsc690,

I know, I saw that but he's still fresh meat in the thread. I ain't seen him before today. so it's fresh meat time. ;p