Personal Info
Known For
Acting
Birthdate
1926-07-26
Day of Death
2015-04-06
Place of Birth
Powderly, Kentucky, USA
James Best
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 (73)
Hollywood in the Atomic Age: Monsters! Martians! Mad Scientists!
2021
Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
2013
The Sweeter Side of Life
2013
Return of the Killer Shrews
2012
Moondance Alexander
2007
Hot Tamale
2006
The Men Who Made the Movies: Samuel Fuller
2002
The Dukes of Hazzard: Hazzard in Hollywood
2000
Death Mask
1998
The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion!
1997
Hooper
1978
The End
1978
Rolling Thunder
1977
Nickelodeon
1976
