No he wasnt gay....He was a real ladies man in his day.

RIP Barney

R.I.P. Don.    






______________________  

 

No!

He really was one of the greatest entertainers in the industry.

Several years ago there was an Andy Griffith Show tribute. Andy, Don and Ron Howard were all there and talking about the series, the other actors who had already passed on, etc. A nice show.

Of course somewhere in there Don says something like "If I had only known little Opie would grow up to be so important I would have sucked up more." It got a laugh out of everybody.

He was truly a great entertainer.  

Funniest movie ever; Private Eyes.

He was one of the greats.

RIP

My favorite scenes were when new prisoners would
be thrown in jail and Fife would pace back and forth saying,
"Now men, this is a maximum security cell"
Outstanding stuff.
Knotts will be missed...

Quoted: Funniest movie ever; Private Eyes. He was one of the greats.

Oh hell yes....

You ever hear of a Wookalar? (sp)   suck your brains right out your nose,

Or the firearm on a timer shoved in Tim Conways pants.....had to undo his fly to get ready to fire, and move his foot,  

He was a good one.

Yup, he was americana!

The Andy Griffith Show was one of my all time favorite shows even though it was in syndication when I found it.

My favorite movie of his probably wasn't the best work. It was the one when he was the "reluctant astronaut" that they replaced the monkey with to go in space for the ride.   "Firing retro rockets!"

The man had class, he made the straight dry man with Andy Griffith (who is very very funny in a different style) shine.

I read on the internet that he was an Army DI and was one tough SOB.  Must be true, it's on the internet.

Rip Mr. Knotts
SoS

His passing is too bad.  No doubt, he was one of the greatest character actors of all time. He will be missed.

Quoted: "Got one bullet for his pistol, has to keep it in his pocket"  Andy Taylor chiming in on Barney's singing of O My Darling.  One of the funniest lines ever on that show. Another icon gone. RIP Mr. Knotts

"Had a pistol, couldn't cock it. Had one bul-let in his poc-ket..."

"Nip it in the bud!"


Edited to add: I saw him on a talk show about 10 years ago. He said that over the years he had travelled a lot of places and hundreds (thousands?) of LEO's ha had met at airports, events, etc would often take a bullet from their Sam Brown loops and give it to him. He said that he had EVERY bullet that had ever been given to him in all those years and someone else vouched for him and said that he kept every bullet he had on display in a case in his office in Hollywood. That's some fellow, he will be missed.

You will be missed...

Dang...

RIP Mr. Knotts.  I loved his movie "The Reluctant Astronaut."

.......what else can be said?

R.I.P.  

As a kid I watched The Andy Griffith Show. The cast was a amazing group when you think about it. Barney, Gomer, Otis, Floyd the barber, Ernest T. Bass, The Darling family, They made you laugh, They were funny, back in the day when no one worried about being P.C. It was a diffrent world then, R.I.P Barney Fife...You will be missed.  

RIP

Barney Fife was my inspiration to be a Cop. He was a lawman through and through.

One of the benefits of staying over at your grandparents house when you're little is watching what they watch.

I could hum the theme to TAGS and Matlock by the time I was in 3rd grade.

An icon. Never to be replaced.

R.I.P. Mr. Knotts.

Quoted: Dang thats to bad. Long live The GHOST and Mr CHICKEN.....

"Atta boy,Luther!"I loved that movie,scared the crap out of me when I was little. RIP Don Knotts.

Damn, that sucks!!!

R.I.P. Mr. Knotts.  Thank you for your service and entertainment.

Quoted: Night Barney.

+ a bunch!

all the great ones going...

Thanks for all the laughs on the Andy Griffth show that I watched as a kid.  You maybe gone, but not forgotten.  RIP.
=================================================================
latimes.com

Don Knotts, star of 'The Andy Griffith Show,' dead at 81
From the Los Angeles Times

Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills.
By Scott Collins
Times Staff Writer

2:30 PM PST, February 25, 2006

Don Knotts, the saucer-eyed, scarecrow-thin comic actor best known for his roles as the high-strung small-town deputy Barney Fife on the 1960s CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show" and the leisure-suit-clad landlord Ralph Furley on ABC's '70s sitcom "Three's Company," has died. He was 81.

Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at UCLA Medical Center, according to Sherwin Bash, his longtime manager.

Family members said that his longtime friend Griffth was one of his last visitors at Cedars on Friday night.

Despite health problems, Knotts had kept working in recent months. He lent his distinctive, high-pitched voice as Turkey Mayor in Walt Disney's animated family film "Chicken Little," which was released in November 2005. He also did guest spots in 2005 on NBC's "Las Vegas" and Fox's "That '70s Show." He occasionally co-headlined in live comedy shows with Tim Conway, his sometime co-star in Disney films such as "The Apple Dumpling Gang." Knotts also appeared as the TV repairman in director Gary Ross's whimsical 1998 comedy "Pleasantville," and voiced the part of T.W. Turtle in the 1997 animated feature "Cats Don't Dance."

As he grew older, Knotts became a lodestar for younger comic actors. The new generation came to appreciate his highly physical brand of acting that, at its best, was in the tradition of silent-film greats such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Harold Lloyd.

Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album entitled "Don Knotts: An Evening with Me," which featured various takeoffs on the "nervous man" routine the comic had made famous on Allen's show. One of the bits, "The Weatherman," concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.

During the mid to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964), "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Reluctant Astronaut" (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures.

"Limpet," the tale of a meek man who is transformed into a fish, has particularly won recent acclaim. Its early mix of live action and animation was a forerunner of such later films as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "Space Jam."

At one point, Jim Carrey was said to be considering starring in a "Limpet" remake, although the project has yet to materialize. Once, when Knotts visited the set of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Carrey paid tribute. "I went to him, and I was just like, 'Thank you so much for "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken,"' Carrey later told an interviewer. " 'I watched it a hundred times when I was a kid.' "

Martin Short has likewise hailed Knotts as a major influence, and at least one of Short's recurring characters, shifty-eyed lawyer Nathan Thurm, owes a debt to Knotts' "nervous man" character, created for "The Steve Allen Show" in the 1950s.

Many TV viewers remember Knotts as Ralph Furley, the ascot-wearing middle-aged landlord who mistakenly viewed himself as a swinger on ABC's hit sex farce "Three's Company." The series starred the late John Ritter as Jack Tripper, a chef who pretended to be gay in order to share an apartment with two attractive young women. The plot of many episodes hinged on Tripper struggling to keep his secret from an ever-suspicious (and homophobic) Furley. Knotts introduced the character in 1979, during the show's fourth season, when the original landlords (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley) had departed for their own spin-off, "The Ropers."

For Knotts, who typically worked in Disney comedies and other family-friendly fare, appearing in a sex comedy — then decried by critics as "jiggle TV" -- constituted a major departure. But he stayed with "Three's Company" until it went off the air in 1984 after eight seasons.

However, it was his portrayal of Barney Fife — a role for which he won five Emmy Awards -- that immortalized Knotts to TV viewers. Deputy Fife, an inveterate bumbler, was not in the series pilot, and was at first intended simply to be part of a large ensemble that would surround Griffith, who played Sheriff Andy Taylor in Mayberry, a fictional North Carolina town near Raleigh.

But not long after the series debuted in October 1960, Knotts stole the show. Griffith, who was meant to be the series' comic focus, shifted to playing straight man. The writers began beefing up Fife's role and creating episodes that depended on the sheriff rescuing Fife from his latest predicament. "Andy Griffith" was the most popular comedy on television during its first season, and never dropped from the Top 10 for the rest of its eight-year run.

In Knotts' hands, Fife was a fully realized stooge, a hick-town Don Quixote who imagined himself braver, more sophisticated and more competent than he actually was. His utter lack of self-control led him into desperate jams that usually culminated with Fife at the end of his rope, bug-eyed and panting with anxiety. Sheriff Taylor allowed his deputy to carry just one bullet, which he was obliged to keep separate from his service revolver due to past trigger mishaps.

Asked how he developed his most famous character, Knotts replied in a 2000 interview: "Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. It's very identifiable."

Jesse Donald Knotts was born in Morgantown, W.Va., on July 21, 1924, the youngest of four brothers. His family life was troubled; Knotts' father twice threatened his mother with a knife and later spent time in mental hospitals, while older brother Earl — nicknamed "Shadow" because of his thinness -- died of asthma when Knotts was still a teenager.

Years later, the actor did not recall his childhood fondly.

"I felt like a loser," he recalled in a 1976 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I was unhappy, I think, most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size."

Knotts turned to performing in his early teens, doing an Edgar Bergen-inspired ventriloquism act with a dummy he named Danny.

He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and served in the Pacific, receiving the World War II Victory Medal among other decorations. After the war, in 1948, he graduated from West Virginia University with an education degree.

He soon borrowed $100 and moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He auditioned for several radio gigs but was turned down. One of his earliest TV roles was on the CBS soap opera "Search for Tomorrow," where he played Wilbur Peterson — a neurotic young man so troubled he communicated only with his sister -- from 1953-55. It was the only non-comedic role he ever played.

But Knotts did not receive widespread attention until he appeared on Broadway in Ira Levin's 1955 comedy "No Time for Sergeants." Based on Mac Hyman's novel, the play concerned a hillbilly — played by a then-unknown Andy Griffith -- who was drafted into the Air Force. Knotts won plaudits as an overly tense military evaluator.

From 1956-60, Knotts further cemented his reputation on NBC's "The Steve Allen Show," where he would play a character named Mr. Morrison, aka "the nervous man." Interviewed on the street, Morrison was asked whether something was making him nervous and would inevitably offer a terse, anxiety-wracked "No!"

In the meantime, "No Time for Sergeants" was made into a feature film in 1958, with Griffith and Knotts reprising their roles. The two actors kept in touch, and when Griffith signed to do the TV series as a rural sheriff, Knotts half-jokingly suggested that the lawman would need a deputy.

Knotts left "Andy Griffith" in 1965, later explaining that he believed the producers had always intended for the series to last just five seasons. In a 1967 Times interview, he said, "The grind gets to you in television, and that's primarily the reason I'm concentrating on pictures."

Griffith stayed with the program for three years after Knotts' departure, however, and Knotts agreed to revive his role as Fife in a number of guest spots. Even without Knotts, "Andy Griffith" remained popular, and the show was ranked No. 1 in its final season, 1967-68. Episodes remain syndication favorites and still appear in frequent rotation on cable network TV Land.

But many fans now believe "Andy Griffith" fizzled creatively without Knotts' manic energy — a point that even Griffith himself has conceded. On the TV fan site www.jumptheshark.com, one viewer wrote, "When Barney Fife left town, 'The Andy Griffith Show' changed from a television classic to just another 60's TV show."

After "Griffith," Knotts stayed busy, although he never quite matched the success he had seen as Barney Fife. An NBC variety hour, "The Don Knotts Show," premiered in 1970 and lasted just one season. The actor subsequently appeared in several live-action Disney features: as a bumbling bandit in "The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975), a would-be safecracker in "No Deposit, No Return" (1976) and an auto-racing veteran in "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo" (1977). He also reprised his role as Fife in "Return to Mayberry," a nostalgic TV movie that delivered enormous ratings for CBS in 1986, and had a recurring role in "Matlock," CBS' courtroom drama starring Griffith.

A self-described hypochondriac, Knotts suffered numerous health reversals in recent years. He developed vision problems that made driving and some other tasks difficult. In the fall of 2003, he injured his Achilles tendon while starring in "On Golden Pond" at the New Theatre in Overland Park, Kansas, and had to wear a brace onstage.

Two of Knotts' three marriages ended in divorce. The first, to Kathryn Kay Metz, lasted from 1947 to 1964 and produced two children, Karen, an actress who co-starred with her father in a 1996 stage revival of "You Can't Take It With You," and Thomas, both of whom survive him. From 1974 to 1983, Knotts was married to Loralee Czuchna. He was married to actress Francey Yarborough at the time of his death.

"He saw poignancy in people's pride and pain and he turned it into something endearing and hilarious," Yarborough, who is also an actress, said in a statement Saturday.

Knotts received a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame in January 2000.

In the foreword to Knotts' 2000 memoir, "Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known," Griffith wrote that Knotts personally had little in common with his most famous creation. "Don was not Barney Fife," Griffith wrote. "I know Don to be a bright man and very much in control of himself. As everyone knows, Barney Fife had very little control of himself. In the comedy scenes we did, I was often closer to Don than the camera and I could look at him before we started those scenes, and through his eyes, I could see him become Barney Fife."

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Quoted: Don Knotts cousin was my dad's neighbor growing up. RIP Mr. Knotts

Family from the Morgantown area?

Mr. Knotts had property we used to hunt on off of Route 119 south of Morgantown.

God speed Mr. Knotts

Quoted: I was in  Wheeling ,WVa some years back,right near the Ohio border.Grabbed a copy of the local paper,and there was a big spread about Mr Knotts.He was a local boy-can't remember if it was the  WVA or Ohio side,but was a great story about a great man.He came up hard,and did well.Truly missed.

Morgantown native

Quoted: ;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." Anybody else agree that was a funny movie?

Think I'll go throw it in the DVD player tonight..

Damn.

SG

Quoted:

Darn.

Too bad.

He was truly one of the best.

R.I.P. Deputy Fife.  

Quoted: Apple Dumpling Gang. One of my favorites as a kid. As Wobblin said, we are loosing real comedians fast, and being left with nothing but a bunch of foul mouthed, sleazy, not talent dog squeeze in their place. People like Don Knotts could make you laugh. He could make you truly feel happy, and smile, and never say a cross word in the process. Thank you Mr. Knotts, for all the laughs, and the times that you made me smile as both a child, and an adult.

I don't know if it was the ADG or the ADG Returns, but in one he and Tim Conway tried to "borrow" an extension ladder off the fire engine.  Had to have been one of the funniest scenes in a movie ever.

And how about the scene in "No Time For Sergeants"? where he was the Corporal testing dexterity?  Had that spiel he rattled off and Andy Griffith just took the rings and unbent them and bent them back.  "But he didn't do it right"

Just got done watching Barney and Andy w/my wife; come downstairs and check the internet to see that he's passed on... He will definitely be missed.

On a funnier note relating to him, when my 3 year old wants to watch "Barney", she isn't talking about the purple monstrosity (of which she knows nothing about). He was an icon, and we all love him.

Sniff,sniff............ Got the collection for Mom for her birthday,of Don Knotts's movies. he will be missed greatly. Sad to see the WWII vets go,they're going so fast now(my LTL delivers the VA Gravemarkers)

It is sad to see one of the funniest entertainers to ever be behind a camera pass on like this. Barney Fife and Don Knotts will live in the hearts of Americans forever.

Bump out of respect for Mr. Knotts.

He was part of the family that moved west and added the "s" onto the name.
I was told I am related to him along with the Knott's Berry Farm people from way back.
Too bad I did not get to meet him.

Barney will always rule!

Quoted: Quoted: I was in  Wheeling ,WVa some years back,right near the Ohio border.Grabbed a copy of the local paper,and there was a big spread about Mr Knotts.He was a local boy-can't remember if it was the  WVA or Ohio side,but was a great story about a great man.He came up hard,and did well.Truly missed. Morgantown native

Yeah,soon as I posted it,wife smacked me and said "MORGANTOWN,YOU JACKASS!"
She was right on both counts!