Who Were Don Knotts’ Wives? A Look Back at the Actor’s Three Marriages
Don Knotts had a lot of love to give. Though his final marriage to Frances Yarborough is probably his most famous, The Andy Griffith Show actor was married three times. Here’s a look back at the famous comedian’s marriages with Kathryn Metz, Loralee Czuchna, and Yarborough.
Don Knotts’ first wife Kathryn Metz
Knotts and Kathryn Metz were college sweethearts. Metz was “a woman of substance, the daughter of a Northern Baptist minister from Wheeling, a West Virginia city so far north that it was almost Ohio,” Daniel de Visé wrote in his biography Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show. They dated for two years then got married in Metz’s father’s church in 1947. They were together for 13 years and had two children, Thomas and Karen.
While Knotts was incredibly close with his Andy Griffith Show co-star, Andy Griffith, their wives did not get along. They were just very different.
“Alas, the spouses didn’t hit it off quite so well,” wrote de Visé. “Kay Knotts was a minister’s daughter, raised with enough domestic savvy to be a good wife and mother. Barbara Griffith was the daughter of a schools superintendent, reared around hired help, a Southern aristocrat who thought dirty dishes and discarded socks were carried off by elves.”
Don Knotts’ second marriage with Loralee Czuchna
About a decade after Knotts’ marriage with Metz ended, he married his second wife, Loralee Czuchna in 1974. According to Wide Open Country, throughout their marriage, there were whispers about Knotts’ mental health negatively affecting their relationship. The site states “his depression allegedly made the couple draw apart.”
Knotts’ daughter Karen has spoken about her father’s struggles with mental health before.
“He was mercurial,” Karen told Closer Weekly of her father. “He had a lot of different kinds of moods. He fought a lot of depression and I helped him, or thought I did, because I could see how he had this endless loop of thought that would always lead to a downward spiral.”
Czuchna told biographer de Visé that it was Knotts’ diagnosis of macular degeneration that led to their relationship’s end.
“When he started to lose his vision, I think he just panicked, and he started to live out some sort of bucket list,” she said.
Knotts and Czuchna divorced in 1983.
Don Knotts’ third wife Frances Yarborough
Almost 20 years later, Knotts remarried for the third and final time. He tied the knot with The Electric Chair actor Frances Yarborough. Though the couple got married in 2002, they actually met in the ‘80s when they worked together on the sitcom What a Country!
“Francey Yarborough, a beautiful, kind-hearted actress, had settled in Hollywood to pursue improvisational comedy,” wrote de Visé. “In early 1987, she was hired on What a Country! Her main job was to help Don learn his lines. She was in her 20s, and he was entering his 60s; yet, they were kindred spirits.”
Yarborough recalled, “My first reaction to him was that he was so vulnerable. I’d never met someone so vulnerable.”
When Knotts died, Yarborough inherited her husband’s properties, which were worth millions. Of her husband’s death, she said in a statement: “He saw poignancy in people’s pride and pain, and he turned it into something endearing and hilarious.”
