Although many original cast members reprise their roles, Frances Bavier had since retired to Siler City, North Carolina. She was in ill health and declined to participate in the movie. In the television movie, Andy Taylor is seen reverentially visiting Aunt Bee's grave, where another actress does the voice-over work for Frances.
Aunt Bee's other relatives sometimes come up in episodes; she speaks of trimming her brother's hair when a girl and, in one episode, her sister Nora visits.
She also has a rapscallion cousin called Bradford J. Taylor who features in a color episode. Bee is a teetotaler. In an episode in which a traveling salesman comes to Mayberry peddling patent medicine, Andy tells Barney that Aunt Bee is heavily against alcohol due to her brother's trouble with the bottle.
It is unclear whether this brother in meant to be Andy's father or one of Andy's uncles. In the same episode, Bee plays the piano and speaks of her baptism. Bee is a member of the town choir and sings in church. Although Clara is a well-meaning woman, she often proves irksome when positioning herself as Bee's rival for the attentions of the single, older gentlemen passing through Mayberry. She vies with Bee in cooking contests and flower shows and replaces her in the town pageant when Bee realizes she has no talent for theatricals.
Clara and Bee attended school together as girls. They compose an anthem celebrating the good life in Mayberry and, in one episode, vacation in Mexico with their friend Myrtle. Clara is sometimes a petty and jealous woman, often ruining Bee's pleasure in one small thing or another with a dismissive sniff or an abrupt and cutting comment.
Beginning with the second season , Aunt Bee had at least one flirtation rarely, if ever, amounting to a true romance per season. These flirtations added significant depth and interest to her character. In the black-and-white seasons, Bee threatened to give her heart to cads of all sorts and sometimes needed Andy's help in extricating herself from unpleasant situations.
Andy was pretty smart and quick to figure out these men were nothing but charlatans but saved Aunt Bee from having her feelings hurt. In the color years, however, Bee gained wisdom through experience. She paired herself with respectable gentlemen and managed her affairs without significant assistance from Andy. The year-old Miss Bavier died Dec. She rarely left the house, town residents say. Evidently, the reclusive actress spent most of her time in a large back room plainly furnished with a bed, a desk, a television and an end table, where she kept her reading and opera glasses, black licorice and a bell.
There also was a blue satin gown she may have worn when she won her Emmy Award, said Hatch. Just as the neat, matronly Aunt Bee would have done, Miss Bavier saved sewing fabric in labeled boxes in a bedroom closet. But what she made with the material was not evident in the house, which had no curtains at the windows. One is that Opie was named after bandleader and radio actor Opie Cates; the other is that he was named for Opie Shelton — , a childhood friend of Griffith, who went on to become president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.
On November 22, , she was admitted to Chatham Hospital, where she was kept in the coronary care unit for two weeks. She was discharged on December 4, , and died at her home two days later, eight days before her 87th birthday. When the show was starting the first season, Andy Griffith told Don Knotts that he only wanted to do it for five years so the two of them both signed five-year contracts.
Bavier was reportedly ambiguous about her role as Aunt Bee.
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