Posted on 04/07/2015 3:24:56 AM PDT by lowbridge
James Best, whose prolific career included 83 movies and 600 TV shows but is best remembered for his role as Rosco P. Coltrane, the bumbling sheriff of Hazzard, died Monday night in Hickory.
Best was 88. He died in hospice after a brief illness of complications from pneumonia, said Steve Latshaw, a longtime friend and Hollywood colleague.
Best’s career included roles in such movies as “The Caine Mutiny” with Humphrey Bogart and “Shenandoah” with Jimmy Stewart. After television came to the fore in the 1950s, Best found roles on popular shows like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
But it was in “The Dukes of Hazzard,” a rural comedy that ran on CBS from 1979 to 1985, that Best became a national figure. As Hazzard’s ever-frustrated lawman catching the dickens from a demanding Boss Hogg, he found himself constantly in pursuit – and ever outwitted – by Luke and Bo Duke in their Dodge Charger “General Lee.”
“I acted the part as good as I could,” said Best in a 2009 interview with The Charlotte Obsserer. “Rosco – let’s face it – was a charmer. It was a fun thing.”
Best and his wife Dorothy moved to the Bethlehem community near Hickory in 2006 from Orlando. At their home on Lake Hickory, he did the thing in life he liked the best – fishing, said Latshaw. He also wrote a book about his career as an actor, writer, producer and director, “Best in Hollywood: The Good, The Bad and the Beautiful.”
“Only thing that makes me sad about having so little time left,” Best wrote in the book, “is leaving the people I love and those who love me.
(Excerpt) Read more at charlotteobserver.com ...
I never watched the show but I am eternally grateful for the gift of “Daisy Dukes”, a joy in denim.
Yep, they really were.
RIP Mr. Best.
The best part of a DOH episode is listening to the music that Waylon Jennings and his band the waylors play throughout (but the chase scenes are the best!)... I wish someone would re-master some of this stuff and release it.
They really did a good job with the soundtrack for the new movie IMO.
DOH was a reworking of a film called Moonrunners (filmed in 1973 released in 1975). Gy Waldron, who wrote and directed that film, created Dukes of Hazard based on interviews he conducted with an actual bootlegger (or moonshiner).
He was in three TZ episodes.
I will, to remind me of my youth. We all get old, its not like we have any choice in the matter.
He was in my dead pool this year!
Thanks. Never was wild about the paint and trim on jeep though.
He was in Forbidden Planet too, long career.
Looking back, I would have liked it to have stayed shooting on location in Conyers/Covington, Georgia.
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I had no idea it shot there. I knew later on that “In the Heat of the Night” shot there a few years later.
Some background on the actors:
5. Sorrel Brooke, who played Boss Hogg, was a great intellect. A classically trained Shakespearean actor, he was a graduate of Columbia and Yale and fluent in five languages. Brooke was especially accomplished at replicating dialects, and based his character’s accent on that of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. His belly was also fake — Brooke wore a padded suit to give him the extra girth that he needed to play the rotund Hogg.
6. James Best grew up in poverty and from a broken family to become a phenomenally successful actor by the time that he was cast as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane. He worked as an accomplished acting teacher for decades and provided instruction to, among other actors, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Farrah Fawcett, and Quentin Tarantino, as well as less famous students while serving as a professor at Mississippi State University. In his spare time, he acquired a black belt in karate and now paints (warning: auto-sound).
7. Ben Jones (Cooter Davenport) was a member of Congress from 1989 to 1993. His writings have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Weekly Standard.
What in tarnation did the ‘P’ stand for? Phillip?
Hi, you are correct. “In the Heat of the Night” did shoot there during it’s 1988 to 1995 run. “The Dukes of Hazzard” shot their first five or six episodes in that area back in late 1978, early 1979 before moving to the Los Angeles County area. I think the Georgia location gave a much more authentic look to the series (like having Hawaii Five-O and Magnum P.I. being done on location in Hawaii). Link enclosed concerning the Dukes/Conyers connection:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1z1rRg8O4g
I saw a recent photo of him. Even in his late 80’s he was still a babe magnet. R.I.P.
Close... ;)
From Wikapedia - Rosco Purvis Coltrane is a fictional character in the American TV series The Dukes of Hazzard.
Not necessarily in that order.
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