The onetime contract player at Fox appeared in films opposite Bette Davis, Maureen O'Hara and Clifton Webb early in her career.
She joined the comedy near the end of its first season in 1961 and went on to appear on 26 episodes, getting $500 per show . When Knotts exited the sitcom to focus on his movie career — Barney was written out, having left Mayberry to join the police department in Raleigh, North Carolina — Lynn departed, too.
The pair returned at a Mayberry High School reunion for the January 1966 episode “The Return of Barney Fife,” in which Barney hopes to rekindle his love affair with Thelma Lou but is crushed to be introduced to her husband. It would mark her final appearance on the series., Thelma Lou and Barney finally do get married.
Lynn reunited with Griffith one more time to play his secretary on a handful of first-season episodes of NBC’sClockwise from top left: Don Knotts, Betty Lynn, Andy Griffith and Aneta Corsaut from ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’Betty Lynn was born on Aug. 29, 1926, in Kansas City, Missouri. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a singer who performed with the Chicago opera. Her mom enrolled her in the Kansas City Conservatory of Music at age 5, and she sang on the radio and in supper clubs as a teenager.
When she turned 18, Lynn was hired by the USO and sent to New York and then to China, Burma and India to perform in a variety show for the troops “as the girl next door,” where she would “sing in the hospitals and talk to the fellas and visit with them,” she