Andy Griffith, 1926–2012

The wise country bumpkin is a staple of American television, and no one played the character as well as Andy Griffith. As Andy Taylor, the sage sheriff of Mayberry, N.C., he dispensed Southern smarts every week during the 1960s to the town’s eccentric inhabitants, including his inept but lovable deputy, Barney Fife. Griffith took it as a compliment that many viewers thought he was playing himself. “You’re supposed to believe in the character,” he said. “You’re not supposed to think, ‘Gee, Andy’s acting up a storm.’”

Born in Mount Airy, N.C., Griffith spent much of his childhood in poverty, said The Wall Street Journal. Determined to escape his hometown, Griffith mastered the trombone and won a scholarship to the University of North Carolina, where he started taking acting lessons. He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in the hit comedy No Time for Sergeants, and two years later played an Arkansas vagabond who becomes a power-crazed TV star in the movie A Face in the Crowd.

Griffith’s defining role came in 1960, when he was cast as Sheriff Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show. It ran for eight ratings-topping seasons until Griffith pulled the plug in 1968 “because I thought it was slipping, and I didn’t want it to go down further.” His career stalled until the 1986 debut of the TV legal drama Matlock, in which he played a “Harvard-educated lawyer with a down-home sensibility,” said the Los Angeles Times. Matlock ran for nine years, but Griffith knew he’d be remembered as Sheriff Taylor. “The backbone of our show was love,” he said. “There’s something about Mayberry and Mayberry folk that never leaves you.”