Knotts
Comic thesp Don Knotts won five Emmys in the '60s for his role as Barney Fife alongside Andy Griffith in ``The Andy Griffith Show.''
Don Knotts, who won TV immortality and five Emmys for playing bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show" with self-deprecating humor, died Friday of pulmonary and respiratory complications at UCLA Medical Center, said Sherwin Bash, his friend and manager. He was 81.
Andy Griffith remembered his friend and co-star as a comedic genius who wrote some of the show's best scenes. "Don was a small man ... but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions," Griffith told the Associated Press on Saturday.
Griffith, who at one point reassured Knotts that he shouldn't be self-conscious about carrying an oxygen tank when he went out in public in his last months, visited Knotts in the ICU to say goodbye hours before his longtime friend died, according to Knotts' sister-in-law, Sophie Yarborough.
Knotts' half-century career included more than 25 films and seven TV series, but his most notable role was the bug-eyed deputy who 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 humor.
"The Andy Griffith Show" was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season during its 1960-68 run, 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."
Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike that of his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and didn't mind being remembered that way.
He also played the would-be swinger landlord Ralph Furley on "Three's Company," which he joined in 1979, and was an original cast member of comedy-variety show "The Steve Allen Show," which ran 1956-61.
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 his heart of gold.
In the live-action/animated 1964 film "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," Knotts played a meek clerk who turns into a fish after he is rejected by the Navy.
In 1998, he had a key role in the back-to-the-past movie "Pleasantville," playing a folksy TV repairman whose supercharged remote control sends a teen boy and his sister (Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon) into a TV sitcom past.
Knotts stayed active in show business and in high spirits up until the very end, completing voiceovers for Disney projects, voicing Turkey Lurkey in the recent "Chicken Little" feature. He also continued to tour in such plays as "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," "Harvey," "On Golden Pond" and "Norman, Is That You?'" in the past few years with his wife, Francey Yarborough.
The West Virginia native began his showbiz career even before he graduated from high school, performing as a ventriloquist at local clubs and churches. He majored in speech at West Virginia U., 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 radio Western "Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders," playing a wisecracking, know-it-all handyman. He stayed with it for five years before making 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.
Knotts is survived by Yarborough, his wife of three years, and two children, Karen and Thomas, from his first marriage.
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