Andy Griffith, an actor most notably as
the small-town sheriff on the long-running TV show that bore his name, died
today, Tuesday, July 3, 2012, at his home on Roanoke Island in North Carolina.
He was 86 years old.
His
death was confirmed by the Dare County sheriff, Doug Doughtie.
Mr. Griffith was already a star,
with rave reviews on Broadway in “No Time for Sergeants” and in Elia Kazan’s
film “A Face in the Crowd,” when “The Andy Griffith Show” made its debut in the
fall of 1960. And he delighted a later generation of television viewers in the
1980s and ’90s in the title role of the courtroom drama “Matlock.”
But by the late 1960s, the younger
viewers networks prized were spurning cornpone, and Mr. Griffith had decided to
leave to make movies after the 1966-67 season. CBS made a lucrative offer for
him to do one more season, and “The Andy Griffith Show” became the No. 1 series
in the 1967-68 season. But Mr. Griffith had decided to move on, and so had the
zeitgeist. “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” with its one-liners about drugs and
Vietnam, and “The Mod Squad,” about an integrated police force, were grabbing a
new generation of viewers.
But the characters in “The Andy
Griffith Show” — Barney (Don Knotts), Gomer (Jim Nabors), Opie (Ron Howard),
Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) and the rest, including Gomer’s cousin Goober Pyle (George
Lindsey, who died in May) — remained tantalizingly real to enthusiasts who
still gather online and sometimes in person in fan clubs to watch the old
reruns.
Beginning with the lead in Elia Kazan’s film “A Face in the
Crowd” in 1957, the story of a rough-hewn television personality who becomes a
power-crazed megalomaniac, Mr. Griffith brought an authenticity to dark roles.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, Mr.
Griffith starred in no fewer than six movies with the words “murder” or “kill”
in their titles. In 1983, in “Murder in Coweta County,” he played a chillingly
wicked man who remains stone cold even as he is being strapped into the
electric chair.
Mr. Griffith’s fans may have
imagined him as a happy bumpkin, but he enjoyed life in Hollywood and knew his
way around a wine list. His career was controlled by personal manager, Richard
O. Linke, who forbade Mr. Griffith to solicit advice from anyone else, even his
wife.
“If there is ever a question about
something, I will do what he wants me to do,” Mr. Griffith said in an interview
with The New York Times Magazine in 1970. “Had it not been for him, I would
have gone down the toilet.”
Far from the relaxed, gregarious,
drawling Andy Taylor, Mr. Griffith was a loner and a worrier. He once hit a
door in anger, and for two episodes of the second season of “The Andy Griffith
Show” he had a bandaged hand (explained on the show as an injury Sheriff Taylor
sustained while apprehending criminals).
But the 35 million viewers of “The
Andy Griffith Show” would have been reassured to learn that even at the peak of
his popularity, Mr. Griffith drove a Ford station wagon and bought his suits
off the rack. He said his favorite honor was having a 10-mile stretch of a
North Carolina highway named after him in 2002. (That was before President
George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.)
Another honor was having his
character place No. 8 on TV Guide’s list of the “50 Greatest TV Dads of All
Time” in 2004. (Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable was No. 1.) But one honor that
was denied him was an Emmy Award: surprisingly, he was nominated only once, for
his role in the TV movie “Murder in Texas,” although Mr. Knotts won five Emmys
as Deputy Fife on “The Andy Griffith Show” and Ms. Bavier won one as Andy’s
aunt. The show itself was nominated three times but also never won.
Andy Samuel Griffith was born in
Mount Airy on June 1, 1926, the only child of Carl Lee and the former Geneva
Nann Nunn. His father was a foreman at a furniture factory. Mr. Griffith
described his childhood as happy, but said he never forgot the pain he felt
when someone called him “white trash.”
After seeing the trombonist Jack
Teagarden in the 1941 film “Birth of the Blues,” he bought a trombone from
Sears, Roebuck & Company with money he earned sweeping out the high school
for $6 a month. He wheedled lessons out of a local pastor, who later
recommended him to the University of North Carolina, where he won a music
degree and married Barbara Edwards. He moved on from the trombone to singing,
and for a while hoped to be an opera singer.
After first aspiring to be a
minister, he tried teaching music and phonetics at the high school in
Goldsboro, N.C., but left after three frustrating years. “First day, I’d tell
the class all I knew,” he told The Saturday Evening Post, “and there was
nothin’ left to say for the rest o’ the semester.”
In spare moments Mr. Griffith and
his wife put together an act in which he posed as a preacher, telling jokes
about things like putting frogs in the baptismal water, and she danced. They
played local civic clubs.
In 1953, speaking to a convention of
the Standard Life Insurance Company in Greensboro, Mr. Griffith, in his
preacher persona, told a comic first-person tale about attending a college
football game and trying to figure out what was going on. Some 500 discs of his
monologue were pressed under the title “What It Was, Was Football,” and it
became a hit on local radio. Mr. Linke, then with Capitol Records, scurried to
North Carolina to acquire the rights and to sign Mr. Griffith.
Mr. Linke began guiding Mr.
Griffith’s career in television and nightclubs. His break came in 1955, when he
was cast in the Broadway play “No Time for Sergeants” as a mountain yokel
drafted into the Air Force — a role he had already played on television, on an
episode of “Playhouse 90.” The New York Journal-American called him “an
engaging and brilliant natural,” and the play was a hit, running for almost two
years. He played the same role in the 1958 film version, with what Bosley
Crowther of The Times admiringly called “staggering simplicity.”
In Mr. Griffith’s first movie, “A
Face in the Crowd” (1957), he played a far more complicated role: a mentally
unbalanced vagrant who is discovered playing the guitar in an Arkansas jail and
becomes a beloved television star until he is undone by his dark side. Mr.
Griffith told The Times Magazine that he was so consumed by the stormy
character that it affected even his marriage.
In 1959, Mr. Griffith returned to
Broadway in the musical comedy “Destry Rides Again,” in a role that had been
played in films by Tom Mix, James Stewart, Joel McCrea and Audie Murphy. Though
reviews were mixed, Newsday declared, “There isn’t a more likable personality
around than Andy Griffith.”
The pilot of “The Andy Griffith
Show” was actually an episode of “The Danny Thomas Show” in February 1960.
Danny Williams (Mr. Thomas) is arrested by a sheriff for running through a stop
sign while driving through Mayberry.
Sheldon Leonard, producer of Mr.
Thomas’s show, intended “The Andy Griffith Show” to fit the image of its star.
Mr. Griffith negotiated for 50 percent ownership, which enabled him to be a
major player in the show’s development.
A critical element to the show’s
success was casting Mr. Knotts as the inept but lovable sidekick. So was the
simple but appealing formula: characters would confront a problem, then resolve
it by exercising honesty or some other virtue.
When Mr. Knotts left the show in
1965, a year after Mr. Nabors, Mr. Griffith said he became “nervous” about its
future. Some principal writers had also left, and critics and viewers perceived
the later years of the show as lacking the sparkle of earlier scripts and more
lovable stars. Ratings, however, never tottered.
In the 1968-69 season, Mr. Griffith
produced a follow-up series, “Mayberry R.F.D.,” with Ken Berry starring as a
widowed farmer and many of the regular characters returning. It ran three
seasons.Mr. Griffith’s acting career stalled after he left the show. Despite
signing a five-year deal with Universal Pictures, he said he was not offered
roles he wanted to play. “I thought I was hot stuff and would go right into the
movies,” he said in an interview with The Virginian-Pilot in 2008. “It didn’t
work out that way.”
He returned to television in the
fall of 1970 with “The Headmaster,” but it lasted only until January. It was
replaced by “The New Andy Griffith Show,” but that was not a success, either,
and was off the air by the summer. Then came a slew of made-for-TV movies.
In 1984, he played a deceptively
laid-back prosecutor in the mini-series “Fatal Vision,” impressing NBC enough
to make him the star of a TV movie, “Diary of a Perfect Murder,” which served
as the pilot for a new series. Mr. Griffith played an unassuming but cagey
defense lawyer in that series, “Matlock,” which made its debut in 1986 and went
on to have an even longer life than “The Andy Griffith Show,” running until
1992 on NBC and for three more years on ABC.
Mr. Griffith continued to play
occasional movie and television parts, and in 1996 recorded a gospel album, “I
Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns,” that went platinum and even won a
Grammy.
In the 2009 movie “Play the Game,”
he played an 80-something widowed grandfather who lives in a nursing home and
awkwardly jumps back into the singles game. He tries Viagra and experiences
oral sex, and says the words “horny” and “erection.”
One thing that had always bothered
Mr. Griffith was people’s assumption that in his depiction of Sheriff Taylor he
was pretty much playing himself. He said he not only threw himself into
creating a textured persona for the small-town lawman, but also helped write
almost every episode — though he didn’t receive writing credit.
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