‘The Andy Griffith Show’ Child Actor Dies: Dennis Rush Was 74

Dennis Rush, a former child actor best known for his roles in The Andy Griffith Show and Man of a Thousand Faces, has died. He was 74.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Rush was diagnosed with leukemia last month while living near San Diego, California, and died en route to a hospital on May 9.

Born in Philadelphia on June 10, 1951, Rush moved with his family at age 1 to Los Angeles for his father’s job as a film archivist. He told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that James Cagney approached him and his father while they ate lunch at Universal-International Pictures’ commissary saying he was looking for a young actor for his movie Man of a Thousand Faces, a 1957 biopic of Lon Chaney.

“He had been casting for the part of a 5-year-old to play his son without any luck,” Rush said. “So he turns to my dad, says he’s looking for a kid to play his son and says, ‘Your son is the spitting image of me at that age.’”

Cagney played Chaney, a silent film star known for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, and Rush played the 4-year-old version of Chaney’s son, Creighton Chaney. He said he and Cagney exchanged Christmas cards every year before the Oscar winner died in March 1986.

TV fans will remember Rush from The Andy Griffith Show as Howie Pruitt, a friend of Opie Taylor (Ron Howard). He recurred as Howie from 1963 to 1965. “I got to be in eight episodes over about a two-and-a-half-year period,” he said in 2022, according to THR. “It was just the best of the best.”

“It took a normal show about five days to film. It took Andy Griffith three,” Rush told the Times. “On lunch breaks, we’d just run to the lunch truck and run back. Ronny Howard had a short basketball hoop set up for him, so we got pretty close to dunking. Andy and some of the others were pretty good guitar players, so it was a regular hootenanny right through lunch.”

He also appeared in multiple episodes of General Electric Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Wagon Train and Laramie. He also worked on episodes of The Millionaire, Checkmate, Perry Mason, The Lucy Show, Gunsmoke, My Favorite Martian, My Living Doll and The Magical World of Disney.

He was drafted into the Marines during the Vietnam War, serving in Hawaii. When he returned home, he discovered his family had spent his Hollywood earnings, so he attended the University of San Diego to become a teacher. However, he found better pay as a maître d’ and a bartender.

Rush is survived by siblings Sally, Monica, Patrick and Megan. He was predeceased by brother Jack, who died in February.