James Best

Jewel Franklin Guy (July 26, 1926 – April 6, 2015), known professionally as James Best, was an American television, film, stage, and voice actor, as well as a writer, director, acting coach, artist, college professor, and musician. During a career that spanned more than 60 years, he performed not only in feature films but also in scores of television series, as well as appearing on various country music programs and talk shows. Television audiences, however, perhaps most closely associate Best with his role as the bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in the action-comedy series The Dukes of Hazzard, which originally aired on CBS between 1979 and 1985. He reprised the role in 1997 and 2000 for the made-for-television movies The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! and The Dukes of Hazzard: Hazzard in Hollywood (2000). Early years Best was born on July 26, 1926, in Powderly, Kentucky, to Lark and Lena (née Everly) Guy. Lena Guy's brother was Ike Everly, the father of the pop duo the Everly Brothers. Best served in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, training in 1944 in Biloxi, Mississippi as a gunner on a B-17 bomber; but by the time he completed his training the war had almost ended, so he was assigned to the army's law enforcement section. In the military police, Best served in war-torn Germany immediately after the Nazi government's surrender in May 1945. While stationed in Germany, he transferred from the military police to an army unit of actors, who traveled around Europe performing plays for troops. Those experiences formed the beginning of his acting career. Film career Best began his contract career in 1949 at Universal Studios, where he met fellow actors Julie Adams, Piper Laurie, Tony Curtis, Mamie Van Doren and Rock Hudson. Initially, he performed in several uncredited roles for Universal, such as in the 1950 film One Way Street, but credited performances soon followed that same year in the Westerns Comanche Territory, Winchester '73, and Kansas Raiders. Work in that genre continued to be an important part of his ongoing film career, including roles in The Cimarron Kid (1952), Seven Angry Men (1955) in which he portrays one of the sons of abolitionist John Brown, Last of the Badmen (1957), Cole Younger Gunfighter (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), The Quick Gun (1964), and Firecreek (1968).