Don Knotts passed away.
He was one of the few really famous native West Virginians.
(Jennifer Garner doesn’t count; she’s from Texas.)
May he rest peacefully.
Barney Fife has always been one of my all-time favorite tv characters. Knotts won five Emmys for that character! It was even fun to see him on a couple of Andy Griffith reunion shows. Sad news.
Susan
Also, that guy that played Gilligan.
RIP, Don.
I didn’t say he was the only one.
While we’re on the subject, though, Patsy Ramsey (JonBenét’s mother) and Lynndie England (the soldier who tortured Iraqi prisoners) are also both originally from WV, but their fame isn’t a good kind of fame.
Never was there a funnier character on TV that Barney Fife, in me 'umble.
Rest, nipped peacefully in the bud, Don Knotts.
Dale
He was brilliant on Andy Griffith. I still laugh at him when they play the re-runs. I think I watched that show mostly for him and Otis. Aunt Bee creeped me out, as did Howard Sprague and especially Floyd the Barber (who probably could have starred in the Shining, if he was younger).
He’s a really good example of somebody taking the cosmetic card he was dealt and doing just fine. RIP.
I read somewhere that the episode in which Barney tries out for the choir was his favorite. I’m inclined to agree.
Dale
Sad news indeed.. Don Knotts was BRILLIANT with Andy Griffith. We all know self-important characters like the one he played, and he really nailed it.
I’m extra proud that in college he was a member of the same fraternity that I was in.
I remember just loving him on The Andy Griffith Show. I haven’t seen any reruns, but even after all these years the name Barney Fife came right to me.
We’ll miss you Don. RIP.
BTW-- has anyone else noticed that in some pictures, Mick Jagger looks a LOT like a somewhat younger Don Knotts?
I have another very slight Don Knotts connection: my uncle wrote the stage play for No Time For Sargents, which is where Don first teamed up with Andy Griffith. Unc says he was a truly nice guy.
That’s pretty cool.
Aha! From the Washington Post:
Among Knotts’s longtime fans is John Waters, the Baltimore filmmaker, who said yesterday that he began following Knotts in the late 1950s, attracted to his “nervous man” character on Steve Allen’s show. "There was never a second ‘Don Knotts,’ " said Waters last night. “If he wasn’t playing the part, who else could you get?” Knotts, said Waters, “never took a bad step. There was always something interesting about him.” Even in his throwaway movies, “you could never hate him.” And Waters knows whom he’d choose to star in Knotts’s life story: Mick Jagger (“same lips, same cheekbones”).
A&E did a Biography on Knotts. I was surprised to learn that he was quite the ladies’ man. Whatever it was he had, women would line up for him. Strange old world …
djm
Okay, I just went and looked up who’s Mick Jagger, to see what he looked like. Yeah, a Don Knotts resemblance in some photos.
Don, you made us all laugh, and that is no small matter, considering the daily events that we must process and accept. However, Don, don’t take our advice and “rest in peace”, but I know you wouldn’t do that anyway. Let me extend a more fitting farewell, IMHO, of “Bon Voyage”.