Actor Jim Nabors, whose portrayal of the grinning country bumpkin Gomer Pyle on the 1960s television hit “The Andy Griffith Show” belied a classic baritone singing voice, died on Thursday at the age of 87, his website said.
(Reuters) – Actor Jim Nabors, whose portrayal of the grinning country bumpkin Gomer Pyle on the 1960s television hit “The Andy Griffith Show” belied a classic baritone singing voice, died on Thursday at the age of 87, his website said.
Nabors, who later became a star with his own television show “Gomer Pyle, USMC,” died at his home in Hawaii, the website said, citing his office manager.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that Nabors had been in declining health for the last few years. He had entered a hospital on Wednesday for tests and asked to be released to go home, his husband Stan Cadwallader told the newspaper.
Nabors’ show business break came in the early 1960s when Andy Griffith saw him in a Los Angeles cabaret – singing in a sophisticated, ear-grabbing voice and telling stories between songs in a Deep South drawl – and offered him a part on “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Griffith’s sitcom – tales of down-home people in a slow-moving Southern town – was one of the most popular on U.S. television at the time and Nabors’ Gomer Pyle character was a hit after joining the cast in 1962.
Gomer was the town’s rustic, kind-hearted gas station attendant who was given to exclamations of “golly” and “shazam” when he was impressed, as well as “surprise, surprise, surprise” and “shame, shame, shame” – depending on the circumstances and stretching each word to several syllables.
After two years on the Griffith show, Nabors was given his own sitcom, “Gomer Pyle, USMC,” with Gomer enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps. It proved to be a viewers’ favorite, sometimes reaching No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings.
Factbox: Six facts about ‘Gomer Pyle’ actor Jim Nabors
After the peak of his entertainment career Nabors concentrated on growing macadamia nuts at his farm on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
In February 1994 Nabors suffered from hepatitis B and underwent a liver transplant. He said he contracted the virus several years before in India but it had remained dormant. He underwent heart surgery in June 2012.
Nabors was a fixture at the Indianapolis 500, singing “Back Home Again in Indiana” at the motor race’s opening ceremony more than 35 times.
While Gomer Pyle never rose above the rank of private on television, the Marine Corps made Nabors an honorary Marine with the rank of lance corporal in 2001. He was promoted to full corporal in 2007.
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