DON KNOTTS, 81 Actor played Barney Fife on 'Andy Griffith'

Knotts said he didn't mind being remembered as the bumbling deputy.
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Don Knotts, who kept generations of TV audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show" and would-be swinger landlord Ralph Furley on "Three's Company," has died. He was 81.
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at a Los Angeles hospital, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs his two signature shows.
Griffith, who remained close friends with Knotts, said he had a brilliant comedic mind and wrote some of the show's best scenes.
"Don was a small man ... but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions," Griffith told The Associated Press on Saturday. "Don was special. There's nobody like him. "
"I loved him very much," Griffith added. "We had a long and wonderful life together."
Unspecified health problems had forced him to cancel an appearance in his native Morgantown, W.Va., in August 2005.
The West Virginia-born actor's half-century career included seven TV series and more than 25 films, but it was the "Griffith" show that brought him TV immortality and five Emmies. The show ran from 1960-68, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series ("I Love Lucy" and "Seinfeld" are the others) in TV history to bow out at the top, and its 249 episodes have appeared frequently in reruns and have spawned a large, active network of fan clubs.
TV roles
As the bug-eyed deputy to Griffith, Knotts carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.
Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and doesn't mind being remembered that way. His favorite episodes, he said, were "The Pickle Story," where Aunt Bee makes pickles no one can eat, and "Barney and the Choir," where no one can stop him from singing.
Knotts appeared on several other television shows. He was one of the original cast members of "The Steve Allen Show" (1956-61), one of a group of memorable comics that included Louis Nye, Tom Poston and Bill "Jose Jimenez" Dana. In 1979, he joined the cast of "Three's Company," also starring John Ritter, Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt.
Knotts' G-rated films were family fun, not box-office blockbusters. He was among an army of comedians from Buster Keaton to Jonathan Winters to liven up the 1963 megacomedy "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," and in 1964, he played a meek clerk who turns into a fish after he is rejected by the Navy in the part-animated "The Incredible Mr. Limpet." His other films include "The Love God?" (1969); "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966); "The Apple Dumpling Gang," (1974); "Gus," (1976); "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo," (1977)