Andy Griffith, who most Americans know as Sheriff Andy Taylor from the long-running series The Andy Griffith Show, died this morning at his home in Roanoke, North Carolina.
The New York Times has an extensive biography in their obituary notice. Griffith was 86 years old. Link
Mr. Griffith was already a star, with rave reviews on Broadway in “No Time for Sergeants” and in Elia Kazan’s film “A Face in the Crowd,” when “The Andy Griffith Show” made its debut in the fall of 1960. And he delighted a later generation of television viewers in the 1980s and ’90s in the title role of the courtroom drama “Matlock.”
But his fame was never as great as it was in the 1960s, when he starred for eight years as Andy Taylor, the sagacious sheriff of the make-believe Southern town of Mayberry, running weekly herd on a collection of eccentrics like his ineffectual deputy, Barney Fife, and the simple-minded gas station attendant Gomer Pyle while, as a widower, patiently raising a young son, Opie.
“The Andy Griffith Show,” Monday nights on CBS, was No. 4 in the Nielsen ratings its first year and never fell below the Top 10. It was No. 1 in 1968, its last season.
The New York Times has an extensive biography in their obituary notice. Griffith was 86 years old. Link
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/03/us/north-carolina-griffith-burial/index.html