Posted on 04/07/2015 12:38:32 PM PDT by cotton1706
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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at charlotteobserver.com ...
I truly enjoyed your work James. RIP.
I remember an old B&W episode of Gunsmoke with Chester, Best was a spoiled child of a millionaire rancher that killed a saloon girl from the Longbranch. Marshall Dillon took him to the town that does the hanging and he eventually turned into a screaming coward. His father became so embarrassed, he made up a story about him escaping when the hangman’s noose was too long and he had $5,000.00 in his shirt pocket. Of course he was actually hung without acting like a coward.
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