Celebrity Biographies
Andy Griffith
For movie lovers, Andy Griffith will always be “A Face in the Crowd”. For Americans, the actor, who died at the age of 86 on July 3, 2012 at his home on Roanoke Island, in North Carolina, was also a very popular face on the small screen.
Andy Griffith was born on June 1, 1926 in Mount Airy, North Carolina, United States. Musically gifted, he earned a bachelor’s degree in this discipline from Chapel Hill, at the University of North Carolina.
He would become a cathodic star thanks to such popular television shows as The Andy Griffith Show (1960), Centennial (1978) and The Matlock Lawyer (1986). Curiously, his best-known film work, A Face in the Crowd (1957), became a predictor of his success on the small screen in American homes. Griffith made his film debut playing Solitaire Rhodes, a charismatic guy with great self-confidence, with whom all viewers would immediately identify, and he couldn’t help but fall victim to the ego that fame and popularity bring. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg gave Elia Kazana golden script that anticipated how quickly certain media figures rise and fall. And Griffith was the perfect actor for the film, because being a stranger, the story told was especially credible.
Griffith never made another film of the quality of A Face in the Crowd on the big screen . He focused mainly on television, and the films in which he intervened, such as Alone in the face of danger (1961), were not great. More interesting was the small independent film The Waitress (2007), sadly remembered for the murder in her apartment, at the hands of a criminal, of its director and actress Adrienne Shelly , who was 40 years old.
Griffith was married three times and has two children. He is survived by his current wife, Cindi Knight.