TLDR: Don Knotts left The Andy Griffith Show after five seasons in 1965, having won five Emmy Awards for playing Deputy Barney Fife.
He left because he believed the show was ending and had signed a five-year film contract with Universal Studios.
The show continued for three more seasons without him. His film career produced several successful regional comedies but never matched his television fame.
He returned to television as landlord Ralph Furley on Three’s Company from 1979 to 1984.
He died on February 24, 2006, at age 81, from lung cancer, with Andy Griffith at his bedside.
In 1965, Don Knotts made a decision based on information that turned out to be wrong.
He believed The Andy Griffith Show was ending after its fifth season. Andy Griffith had mentioned the possibility of wrapping up, and Knotts, seeing an opportunity to build a film career while he was still at the height of his fame, approached Griffith about staying on in exchange for an ownership stake in the show.
Griffith, who owned 50 percent with his manager, thought Knotts was asking for half of his personal share. He said no. Knotts read the conversation as confirmation that the show was finishing. He signed a five-year contract with Universal Studios.
The show continued for three more seasons. It ranked number one in the country for the last two of them.
By the time Knotts understood what had happened, he was already committed to Universal. He left anyway. The misunderstanding had already decided things.
He Had Won Five Emmys Playing Barney Fife
Don Knotts was born on July 21, 1924, in Morgantown, West Virginia. His childhood was defined by a father who struggled with schizophrenia and alcoholism, whose volatility drove Knotts inward and contributed to a lifelong tendency toward anxiety and hypochondria that he would eventually turn into one of the most recognizable comedic personas in American television history.
He and Andy Griffith first met in 1955, playing in the Broadway production of No Time for Sergeants.
When Griffith developed his television series, he called Knotts and asked if he wanted to be a deputy. Knotts, recognizing what the role could be, said yes.
Barney Fife earned Knotts five Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor, an extraordinary record for a single recurring television character. Barney was a deputy with one bullet, kept in his shirt pocket, and an authority that existed entirely in his own mind.
The comedy came from the gap between who Barney believed he was and who he actually was. Knotts played that gap with precision and genuine warmth. Audiences loved Barney because they could see themselves in his dignity and his delusion simultaneously.
His Film Career Was Bigger in Some Places Than Others
Before the Universal contract, Knotts had already made one significant film. The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964) was a hybrid live-action and animation feature for Warner Bros. in which he played a Brooklyn bookkeeper who transforms into a fish and helps defeat German submarines during World War II.
He appeared on screen for only about twenty minutes, with the rest of his performance delivered through voice-over.
The film was largely dismissed by critics but found a devoted audience on television and became a genuine cult classic, with remake attempts continuing for decades.
His first Universal film, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), was the peak of what followed. He played Luther Heggs, a small-town typesetter who spends a night in a haunted mansion to prove himself as a journalist.
The film was made with the same writers who had crafted the best Barney Fife material, and it showed. In the Midwest and the South, where Universal targeted its regional marketing, it was one of the most profitable releases of the year.
In New York City, it was virtually unknown.
Four more Universal films followed across five years. The Reluctant Astronaut (1967) sent him to NASA. The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) put him in a Western comedy. The Love God? (1969) attempted a satire on the sexual revolution that alienated his core audience by placing his conservative persona in a pornographic magazine empire. How to Frame a Figg (1971) closed the contract on a weak note.
Universal did not renew.
The films that worked, worked well. The ones that tried to update his image for the changing cultural climate of the late 1960s did not.
Knotts was not a transitional performer. He was a specific kind of comedian whose work depended on a specific kind of audience trust, and that trust was built on a character type that didn’t translate easily to the more cynical tastes of the New Hollywood era.
After Universal passed on renewing, he moved to Disney and found his biggest box office success there. The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), a family comedy made alongside Tim Conway, earned an adjusted domestic box office of over $300 million, more than any of his five Universal films.
The partnership with Conway worked because it gave him a comedic partner again, something the solo Universal films had never quite replaced.
He Kept Going Back to Barney Fife
While he was making films for Universal, Knotts returned to The Andy Griffith Show for five guest appearances between 1966 and 1968.
These earned him two additional Emmys, bringing his total for the character to five. Barney had moved to Raleigh and become a detective, but whenever he came back to Mayberry, the old insecurities came with him.
The episodes were among the most watched of the show’s later seasons.
In 1968 he appeared in the first episode of the continuation series Mayberry R.F.D., serving as best man at Andy Taylor’s wedding to Helen Crump. In 1986, he returned for the television movie Return to Mayberry, which earned a 33.0 Nielsen rating and captured one-third of the viewing public.
It was the highest-rated television movie of the year. Barney Fife, reunited with Andy Taylor after all those years, was still the most compelling thing either man had ever done on screen.
Ralph Furley Was His Second Great Character
In 1979, when Norman Fell and Audra Lindley left Three’s Company for their own spinoff, the producers searched for a “Don Knotts type” to replace them as landlord. They eventually realized they could simply ask Knotts himself. He joined as Ralph Furley in the fourth season without an audition.
Furley was different from Barney in important ways. Where Barney’s comedy came from misplaced authority, Furley’s came from misplaced vanity.
He wore outlandish leisure suits and ascots and believed himself to be a suave man of the world, while being entirely subservient to his harder-hearted brother who actually owned the apartment complex.
He wore a prominent toupee. He thought he was sophisticated. He was not.
John Ritter, who starred in the show, idolized Knotts and treated him with reverence on set. The chemistry of the cast made Knotts’ transition from single-camera television to the live-audience three-camera format work better than it might have otherwise. Three’s Company was a top-ten show during the Knotts years.
Andy Griffith reportedly hated the show.
He felt it was lowbrow and that the broad delivery the format required was beneath Knotts’ abilities.
When Knotts later joined Griffith on Matlock, Griffith had to repeatedly tell him to tone down the Ralph Furley energy. Knotts had spent five years calibrating for an audience that rewarded the loudest reaction.
What Happened to Him in the End
In his final years Knotts developed macular degeneration in both eyes that left him virtually blind. He continued voice acting, providing characters for Disney’s Chicken Little and the Hermie and Friends animated series, work that didn’t require him to navigate a physical set.
In late 2005 he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He kept it private, telling very few people including many of his close friends. He underwent treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Andy Griffith flew from his home in North Carolina to Los Angeles to be with him. He sat at Knotts’ bedside while his old friend was unconscious.
Griffith had always teased Knotts by calling him Jesse, his first name, which Knotts reportedly hated. He leaned in and said “Jess, breathe.” He said he saw Knotts’ chest heave and his shoulder move. He believed Knotts could hear him.
He whispered “I love you” before Knotts passed.
Don Knotts died on February 24, 2006, at age 81.
Griffith said publicly: “I lost my best friend.” They had known each other for fifty years, since a Broadway production of No Time for Sergeants, and had maintained a friendship through a misunderstanding that changed both their careers and through disagreements about Three’s Company and through everything else that fifty years produces.
Knotts is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
In 2016, his hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia, put up a statue of him in front of the Metropolitan Theatre where he had first performed as a young man.
His headstone depicts his three most recognizable roles: Barney Fife, Ralph Furley, and Henry Limpet.
He left the number one show in the country because he thought it was ending.
He was wrong about that.
He was right that 1965 was the moment to try something new.
Both things can be true.
The misunderstanding cost him three years of Barney Fife. It also gave him five films, a second great character, and the clearest possible evidence that what he had built with Andy Griffith was irreplaceable.
