Likable, durable TV star whose Southern drawl and relaxed manner helped shape a persona which was initially that of a dense backwoods yokel but soon smoothed into that of the wily country boy.
Andy Griffith began a career as a high school music teacher in his native North Carolina after graduating from college, but after several years decided to venture into entertainment. He began writing and performing comic monologues at civic clubs and night spots; the best known of these routines, the hilarious "What It Was Was Football", in which the tale's protagonist puzzles over the activity of tossing about the ol' pigskin, eventually acquired tremendous popularity.
Griffith's big break came when he landed the broadly drawn but meaty role of an earnest but incredibly stupid military recruit in "No Time for Sergeants". He first played it on TV, enjoyed great success with it on Broadway (1955-56) and would eventually reprise the role for the unimaginative but amusing 1958 film version. Griffith's first feature film, though, was much more provocative--Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd" (1957)--wherein the star boldly and successfully explored the underbelly of his emerging image as Lonesome Rhodes, a small-town yokel turned national media celebrity turned egotistical Frankenstein's monster.
Griffith starred in several other films (e.g., "Onionhead" 1958, an unabashed ripoff of "Sergeants") but guaranteed himself a career when his 1960 guest stint as mayor of a small Southern town on Danny Thomas's "Make Room for Daddy" led to his own sitcom. "The Andy Griffith Show" (CBS, 1960-68) was always near the top of the ratings for its lengthy run, with the star embodying his best-remembered role, that of small-town sheriff Andy Taylor, the bemused, gently philosophizing still center of Mayberry, a place virtually without crime but with plenty of quirky local denizens. A talented supporting cast helped Griffith give the show both heart and laughs, and its cracker-barrel feel-goodness was potent enough to make a 1986 TV-movie, "Return to Mayberry", the most popular telefilm of its season.
Griffith made a handful of features after the show's success, but that very popularity and the star's low-key, homespun quality very much typed him as a TV star. He made many deliberate attempts to duplicate the show's success (on two other series he also played characters named "Andy"), but series like "The Headmaster" (CBS, 1970-71), "The New Andy Griffith Show" (CBS, 1971), "Salvage 1" (ABC, 1979) and "Best of the West" (ABC, 1981-82), along with several others, never lasted very long. Griffith did, however, form a production company, Andy Griffith Enterprises, and he kept very busy in TV-movies in which he deliberately--and often with success--attempted now and then to vary or expand the kind of roles he usually played. His fanatical judge on "Crime of Innocence" (1985) or his hunter in "Winter Kills" (1974), for instance, recalled the role reversal of "Face in the Crowd" and he received an Emmy nomination for his supporting role in "Murder in Texas" (1981).
Griffith's return to a triumphant TV series finally came with "Matlock" in 1986, in which he essayed the title role of a crafty but sympathetic and good-humored lawyer whose clever snooping and courtroom tactics eschewed the thunderous dramatics of Perry Mason, in many ways adding just a small touch of sophistication to his Andy Taylor of a quarter-century earlier. The show originally aired on NBC for six seasons (1986-92) and another two on ABC (1993-95). Griffith reprised the role in several TV-movies, and this self-effacing star, a Will Rogers for the home electronics era, finally received a measure of acclaim when he was inducted in the TV Academy Hall of Fame in 1992. He returned to the big screen as the villainous General Rancor opposite Leslie Nielsen's secret agent Dick Steele in the uneven comedy "Spy Hard" (1996).
Copyright © Baseline 2006.