Don Knotts dated a star from Little House on the Prairie. Here's why it didn't work out

Can you guess which actress it was?

March 6, 2024, 9:27AM By MeTV Staff

CBS Television Distribution

Don Knotts was a lot of things. He was a musician. He was an accomplished nightclub performer. He was the perfect guest star on variety shows. He was a sitcom great. Throughout all his show biz fame, Knotts was also a noted ladies' man.

Knotts' various relationships and affairs (especially the extramarital ones) are well-documented in plenty of Hollywood tell-alls. Don's daughter Karen stated that her father was "very loved by women all the time."

“There was never a woman who was angry at him,” she told Page Six. “Like nobody said, ‘Oh, your dad didn’t come through with the relationship’ or anything. Everybody loved him and if the relationship was over, they became his friend.”

Karen wasn't wrong.

One woman who wasn't quite so enamored with Knotts was Little House on The Prairie star Charlotte Stewart. Fans of Little House will remember Stewart best as Eva Beadle, although she also appeared in several works by auteur filmmaker David Lynch. In her 2016 memoir, Little House in the Hollywood Hills, Stewart described a liaison with a certain Deputy of Mayberry and wrote about why the relationship didn't last.

"Another time, someone thought I should go out with Don Knotts, the actor who played Andy Griffith's sidekick," wrote Stewart. This was most likely sometime between 1964 (when Knotts divorced his first wife) and 1974 (when he married his second). Before Prairie, Stewart had appeared in a few TV guest spots, with roles on shows like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Mannix, and The Waltons. By the time Little House on the Prairie was on the air, Knotts was married to wife #2, Loralee Czuchna.

Stewart continued, "Now look, who doesn't love Don Knotts— a terrific comedic performer— but he took me to dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which was pretty old-school for my tastes. It'd be like going to The Brown Derby, which had been the happening spot in the '40s. Don was 20 years older, of a different era, and we just didn't click. I could barely make it through dinner."

Alas, it seems as though their May-December relationship wasn't meant to be. Knotts married Loralee, and Stewart went onto the rest of her life, racking up roles in Twin Peaks, Tremors, and even a guest spot on Matlock.