Aunt Bee takes over management of Andy’s household and becomes Opie’s surrogate mother and grandmother. In the show’s premiere episode, “The New Housekeeper,” Aunt Bee returns to Mayberry from Morgantown, West Virginia - coincidentally, the real-life birthplace of Knotts - after Andy’s housekeeper marries and moves away. Bavier was cast as Aunt Bee, the paternal aunt of the widower sheriff. 3, 1960, “The Andy Griffith Show” made its debut on CBS. That episode (the program was subsequently renamed “The Danny Thomas Show”) starred actors Andy Griffith and Ron Howard, who were portraying a North Carolina sheriff named Andy Taylor and his son, Opie it served to introduce the new characters to a large TV audience. “Aunt Bee” - it’s typically styled “Bee,” instead of “Bea,” even though the character’s name was Beatrice - was launched after she was cast, not as Aunt Bee, but as a character called Henrietta Perkins, in an episode on Danny Thomas’s long-running “Make Room for Daddy” sitcom. Along the way, she won an Emmy Award, in 1967, as Outstanding Supporting Comedy Actress for that role her costar, Don Knotts, also won for comedic supporting actor the same year, one of the five Emmys he’d collect for his portrayal of Deputy Barney Fife. Of course it was Bavier’s 10-year stretch - the longest of any Mayberry character - as Aunt Bee on “The Andy Griffith Show” and its spinoff, “Mayberry R.F.D.,” that brought her fame and instant recognizability. It marked a full-time shift to television and film work for Bavier, which had begun a year earlier with her role in the science fiction classic, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” In her final Broadway role, she starred alongside Henry Fonda in “Point of No Return,” the year-long run of which ended in 1952. But working in vaudeville and getting her first role on Broadway (in the play “The Poor Nut”) at the age of 22 led to expanded stage work that included roles on and off the Big Apple’s Great White Way and even trips to entertain World War II troops in the Pacific with the USO. Frances Bavier was born in 1902 near Gramercy Park - a few blocks south of Central Park - in New York City.
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