
Place of Birth:
Powderly, Kentucky, USA
Date of Birth:
7/26/1926
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).

Hot Tamale

Firecreek

Run, Simon, Run

Shenandoah

Rolling Thunder

Shock Corridor

Death Mask

Ride Lonesome

Moondance Alexander

Winchester '73

The Left Handed Gun

The Cimarron Kid

The Killer Shrews

The Naked and the Dead

Hooper

Seminole

Calling Homicide

The Rack

Apache Drums

The Men Who Made the Movies: Samuel Fuller

Verboten!

The Brain Machine

Comanche Territory

Hot Summer Night

Kansas Raiders

The Mountain Road

The Quick Gun

Gaby

The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion!

The Dukes of Hazzard: Hazzard in Hollywood

Man on the Prowl

Cole Younger, Gunfighter

I Was a Shoplifter

Return of the Killer Shrews

One Way Street

Nickelodeon

Savages

Cast a Long Shadow

Top of the World

The Sweeter Side of Life

The End

Black Gold

Target Unknown

City of Bad Men

Ode to Billy Joe

Come Next Spring

Last of the Badmen

Three on a Couch

Air Cadet

Sounder

The Battle at Apache Pass
Aftermath

Forbidden Planet

The Raid

First to Fight

The Runaway Barge

Black Spurs

The Yellow Tomahawk

Hollywood in the Atomic Age: Monsters! Martians! Mad Scientists!

The Caine Mutiny

Return from the Sea

Francis Goes to West Point

Peggy

Seven Angry Men

Column South

Steel Town

Riders to the Stars

Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair

The Savage Bees
Skip Taylor

They Rode West

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia