If you’re an avid fan of The Andy Griffith Show, actor Elinor Donahue is a familiar face from the series’ first season. She played “lady druggist” Ellie Walker on the CBS comedy for about a dozen episodes until her unexpected departure.
Donahue opened up about what exactly made her exit the show so suddenly and the kindness shown to her by former co-star Don Knotts.
Who was Elinor Donahue on ‘The Andy Griffith Show’?
Donahue told the Television Academy Foundation how she came to join the Andy Griffith Show cast in 1960.
“I was called into the office to meet with the producers, went home that afternoon, and found out I had the part. And I didn’t read or anything. I didn’t know that much about it except that I was going to be on the show with Andy Griffith,” Donahue said.
Donahue’s character, Ellie, arrives in Mayberry having taken over the drugstore from her uncle and eventually begins dating the town’s sheriff, Andy Taylor.
Why did Ellie leave ‘The Andy Griffith Show’?
Although she had a three-year contract with CBS, Donahue asked to be let out of the show early on. As she explained to Don Knotts’ daughter, Karen, in her recent book, Tied Up in Knotts: My Dad and Me, she was only 23 years old when she appeared on the Andy Griffith Show. Her previous program, Father Knows Best, “ended abruptly” and Donahue “had no idea how to live a normal adult life.”
The actor got married, had a child, and then found herself divorced. She then accepted the role of Ellie in the series but soon felt “undermined” when some of the funnier lines in the scripts were given to Don Knotts by Griffith.
“So he will take things that were actually written for Miss Ellie and the sheriff and give them to your dad,” Donahue told Karen. “And of course, they were funny, and they made those two characters so rich and terrific. But I felt that it was because I was so terrible.”
Between her dwindling self-confidence on the set and “my emotional problems,” she “began to lose weight and was becoming anorexic.” She developed pneumonia, which kept her off the show and required scripts to be written around her.
Donahue said the only castmate to check on her at that time was Don Knotts
While she was hospitalized for treatment of pneumonia, Donahue told Karen Knotts’ book that no one from the show rang her to ask how she was — except for Don Knotts.
“The only person who called me from the show was your dad,” the actor said. “He wanted to make sure I was all right. He was just absolutely precious. I was very, very touched by that. It meant the world to me at that point in time.”
Finally, Elinor Donahue left The Andy Griffith Show and took care of herself: “I had my agent ask for my release, and they said OK. There didn’t seem to be any fight about it, so I left the show at the end of the first year.”
Is Elinor Donahue still alive?
Elinor Donahue was born on April 19, 1937. In 2023, she turned 86 years old and remains one of the few Andy Griffith Show cast members still alive.
Donahue had a long, productive career in film and television after leaving The Andy Griffith Show. Her TV credits include main roles in Many Happy Returns, The Odd Couple, and Get a Life. Elinor Donahue’s movies include Going Berserk, Pretty Woman, and The Princess Diaries 2.
