James Best
Actor
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Best (born Jewel Franklin Guy; July 26, 1926 – April 6, 2015) was an American television, film, character, voice, and stage actor, as well as a writer, director, acting coach, artist, college professor, and musician, whose career spanned seven decades of television. He appeared as a guest on various country music and talk shows.
One of the busiest actors in Hollywood, who began his contract career with Universal Studios in 1949, where he met unfamiliar actors Julie Adams, Piper Laurie, Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson. Best's long career began in films in 1950. He appeared primarily in Westerns, playing opposite Audie Murphy in Kansas Raiders (1950), The Cimarron Kid (1952) and The Quick Gun (1964), Raymond Massey in Seven Angry Men (1955), George Montgomery in Last of the Badman (1957), Frank Lovejoy in Cole Younger Gunfighter (1958), and Randolph Scott in Ride Lonesome (1959). He also starred in the science fiction cult movie, The Killer Shrews (1959) and its sequel, Return of the Killer Shrews (2012). He is most known for playing bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in the action/comedy Dukes of Hazzard, a role that he revised in The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! (1997) as his character was now "boss" of Hazzard County as well as sheriff, and again in The Dukes of Hazzard: Hazzard in Hollywood (2000).
Filmography
Winchester '73
as Crater 1950
The Caine Mutiny
as Lt. JG Jorgensen 1954
Shock Corridor
as Stuart 1963
Rolling Thunder
as Texan 1977
Ride Lonesome
as Billy John 1959
Shenandoah
as Carter, Rebel Soldier 1965
Hooper
as Cully 1978
The Left Handed Gun
as Tom Folliard 1958
The Killer Shrews
as Thorne Sherman 1959
Firecreek
as Drew 1968
The End
as Pacemaker Patient 1978
Moondance Alexander
as McClancy 2007
Sounder
as Sheriff Charlie Young 1972
Return of the Killer Shrews
as Thorne Sherman 2012
Nickelodeon
as Jim 1976
The Sweeter Side of Life
as Paddy Kerrigan 2013