Strangers who asked where Griffith lived would receive circular directions that took them to the beach, said William Ivey Long, the Tony Award-winning costume designer whose parents were friends with Griffith and his first wife, Barbara. In the coastal town of Manteo, Griffith protected his privacy with help from a circle of friends who revealed little to nothing about him. "With great grace, he handled the constant barrage of people wanting to talk to Andy Taylor."
Griffith's signature role "put heavy pressure on him because everyone felt like he was their best friend," Fincannon said. In a statement Tuesday, President Barack Obama said Griffith's characters "warmed the hearts of Americans everywhere." In 2005, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the country's highest civilian honors. Griffith was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts Hall of Fame in 1992.
This new character - law-abiding, fatherly and lovable - was like a latter-day homage to Sheriff Andy Taylor, updated with silver hair. His television career slowed down in the 1970s but resumed in 1986 with "Matlock," a light-hearted legal drama in which Griffith played a cagey Harvard-educated, Southern-bred attorney with a leisurely law practice in Atlanta.ĭecked out in his seersucker suit in a steamy courtroom (air conditioning would have spoiled the mood), Matlock could toy with a witness and tease out a confession like a folksy Perry Mason. The stage and screen versions of "No Time for Sergeants," a production that cast Griffith as Will Stockdale, an over-eager young hillbilly who, as a draftee in the Air Force, overwhelms the military with his rosy attitude. That led to his first national television exposure on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1954. Griffith's skill at playing a lovable rube was first established on a comedic monologue titled "What It Was, Was Football," about a bumpkin attending a college football game. "But I guess you could say I created Andy Taylor," he said.
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He described himself as having the qualities of one of his last roles, that of the cranky diner owner in "Waitress," and also of his most manipulative character, from the 1957 movie "A Face in the Crowd." In a 2007 interview with the Associated Press, Griffith said he wasn't as wise as the sheriff or as nice.
Griffith said he decided to end it "because I thought it was slipping, and I didn't want it to go down further."
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The series became one of only three in TV history to bow out at the top of the ratings (The others were "I Love Lucy" and "Seinfeld."). Almost 20 years later, a reunion movie titled "Return to Mayberry" was the top-rated TV movie of the 1985-86 season. The show initially aired from 1960 to 1968 and never really left television, living on for decades in reruns. The sheriff's loving Aunt Bee was played by the late Frances Bavier. George Lindsey, who died in May, was the beanie-wearing Goober. "And Andy Griffith's the reason for that."ĭon Knotts, who died in 2006, was the goofy Deputy Barney Fife, while Jim Nabors joined the show as Gomer Pyle, the cornpone gas pumper. "What made `The Andy Griffith Show' work was Andy Griffith himself - the fact that he was of this dirt and had such deep respect for the people and places of his childhood," said Craig Fincannon, who runs a casting agency in Wilmington and met Griffith in 1974.Ī character on the show "might be broadly eccentric, but the character had an ethical and moral base that allowed us to laugh with them and not at them," he said.
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