Frances Bavier was the greatest actor on The Andy Griffith Show

For fans in the know, watching The Andy Griffith Show episode “The Pageant” was a little bit of an ironic experience.

In the episode, Aunt Bee is suddenly cast in the leading role in Mayberry’s Centennial Pageant and it turns out her acting skills are much more limited than she ever realized.

Of course, if you look at the cast of The Andy Griffith Show, Aunt Bee actor Frances Bavier was by far the most seasoned actor of the bunch.

While Andy Griffith, Don Knotts and Ron Howard were all still relative newcomers to major acting roles, by the time the show premiered in 1960, Bavier had built up one of the most legendary and best regarded Broadway careers of any of her actor peers.

Her theater career started in 1925 when she graduated from a dramatic arts college and immediately began taking onstage roles.

Through the Thirties and Forties, she could be found endearing herself to audiences with well-remembered appearances, and by the start of the Fifties, one critic noted that she was being cast to play “the most exacting roles of the American theater.”

She was so good, in fact, that she got away with something no other actors of her era ever could. On multiple occasions, she left a Broadway cast for other opportunities, and yet she always got offered new roles and never was seen as undependable because her performances were consistently so good.

One time, she left the stage to join a movie cast, but another time, perhaps most famously, she left on a tour to entertain World War II troops.

During this time in the Forties, Bavier behaved to soldiers a lot like the motherly way we think of Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show. Soldiers recalled how she would crack them up onstage and then after performing, talk with them for hours, becoming a caring ear.

In 1955, the Los Angeles Times reported that 10,000 of these soldiers passed around a giant scroll to gift to Bavier on Mother’s Day to thank her for being “Mom to a million homesick GIs,” noting how eager she was to comfort them in their time of need.

In the 1950s, only after she had 25 years of theater experience under her belt, Bavier then made the move to doing way more TV and movie productions.

Starting in 1951, she was given choice character roles on the strength of her acting reputation, and on TV, she appeared in hit shows like Dragnet and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

By the mid-‘50s, Bavier joined her first sitcom cast as the beloved head of a boarding house in It’s a Great Life.

After that series ended in 1956, Bavier continued working in movies and landing roles on TV shows including Perry Mason and Wagon Train. Then in 1960, The Andy Griffith Show cast her as Aunt Bee, and the rest is TV history.

That year, critics pointed to Bavier as an example of why more sitcoms should anchor themselves with talented older women with seasoned acting chops.

Bavier was always glad that she spent so much time onstage before she ever gave a thought to auditioning in Hollywood.

In 1959, she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that her age was her strength in Hollywood because it conveyed her vast experience.

“I’m perhaps fortunate that I don’t have to live up to a ‘glamour’ role,” Bavier said. “But I really feel that just because a person has approached, or passed, that 50-year mark there is no reason to hide behind the façade of those fallible 40s. I think that with the average women, the longer she’s lived, the more she’s learned.”