![]() Two years later, Knotts heard Griffith was putting together a comedy based on a small-town sheriff. “Sergeants” also starred an up-and-coming comedian named Don Knotts. I think where you wanna live is your business.” Griffith, as the drawling Stockdale: “Well, sir. “I think that I would rather live in the rottenest pigsty in Tennessee or Alabama than the fanciest mansion in all of Georgia,” says a needling major played by James Millhollin. “No Time for Sergeants” was turned into a movie the following year and, with comic relish, Griffith reprised his role of Air Force recruit Will Stockdale, a naive rustic plucked from the Georgia backwoods. ![]() The 1957 film was a box office disappointment but critics lauded Griffith’s portrayal of an Arkansas hobo propelled to hollow fame. Griffith followed that with a dramatic role as a vagrant-turned-signing idol in “A Face in the Crowd” with Patricia Neal. It got him on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” And it established Griffith as a Southern comedic voice, leading to a role as the hillbilly recruit in the TV production of “No Time for Sergeants” and then the same role on Broadway, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. “What It Was Was Football” sold a million copies. It got big laughs and Griffith spun to fame on a phonograph needle. He dreamed up a comic monologue about a country bumpkin mystified by a game “where you try to run across a cow pasture without getting hit or stepping in something.” Motoring one evening in 1953 from Chapel Hill to an appearance in Raleigh, Griffith was struck by an inspiration that would ignite his career. Griffith played Sir Walter Raleigh from 1949 to 1953 and appeared on the dinner club circuit as a comedian and singer. Lanky and handsome, his head thick with wavy black hair, he found summer work at the outdoor drama “The Lost Colony” in Manteo. He taught school for three years in Goldsboro, N.C. He went on to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and majored in music, taking five years to get his degree in 1949. He took a liking to music and learned to play the trombone at 16.ĭespite a so-so academic record, he was industrious, earning enough money sweeping the high school after classes to buy a bass horn and guitar. Griffith was born in Mount Airy, N.C., on June 1, 1926, son of Carl and Geneva Griffith. He was Andrew Samuel Griffith, but we knew him best as “Andy.” He died Tuesday at age 86 in Manteo, N.C. ![]() He was a vocalist, an actor, a stand-up comic, a producer and once even a schoolteacher, but we knew him best for creating the mythic Mayberry, a Camelot in bib overalls where home-spun wisdom reigned, in “The Andy Griffith Show.” ![]() ![]() She said she moved to Mount Airy after her longtime home in Los Angeles was twice burglarized.CHARLOTTE, N.C. Lynn also had recurring roles on Family Affair and My Three Sons and showed up on episodes of The Farmer’s Daughter, Mod Squad, Little House on the Prairie, Police Story and Barnaby Jones. She played Ray Bolger’s sister-in-law in 1953-54 on the ABC show Where’s Raymond?, had small parts in such films as Gun for a Coward (1956) and Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) and guest-starred on series including Wagon Train, Lawman and Tales of Wells Fargo before her gig on Texas John Slaughter. I didn’t understand that they were having great difficulty because people were staying home instead of going to the movies. “When they asked me what I had been doing, I said, ‘I’ve been doing live television, it’s absolutely wonderful, it’s like doing a play!’ They’d all just freeze. “The studios hated television,” she noted. She then played the youngster sister of Barbara Bates’ character in June Bride, starring Bette Davis and Robert Montgomery, and the daughters of Loretta Young in Mother Is a Freshman (1949) and Fred MacMurray and O’Hara in Father Was a Fullback (1949).Īfter working again with Webb in Cheaper by the Dozen and with Davis in Payment on Demand (1951), Lynn returned to New York and performed frequently on live TV, which she said derailed her movie career. She came to Los Angeles with her mom and made her big-screen bow in the family comedy Sitting Pretty (1948), starring Robert Young, Maureen O’Hara and Clifton Webb. After eight months with the USO, she appeared in the Broadway-bound comedy Park Avenue, where she was spotted by a Fox talent scout and signed by the studio. ![]()
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