James Best

Jewel Franklin Guy of Powderly, Kentucky, worked for sixty years under the name James Best, and for most of them he was the kind of actor whose face you knew and whose name you did not. The film career starts in 1950 with a small part in Winchester '73 and runs straight through the decade inside the studio system: Air Cadet (1951), The Raid and The Caine Mutiny (both 1954), an uncredited crewman in Forbidden Planet (1956), The Rack the same year.

The real record of what he did for a living is the television list, and it reads like an index of the American western: Hopalong Cassidy, The Gene Autry Show, Tombstone Territory, Trackdown, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Laramie, The Rebel, Stagecoach West, The Guns of Will Sonnett. He specialised in the young man with something wrong with him, and he had the equipment for it, a high voice that tightened under pressure and could travel from friendly to frightened inside a single line. Ride Lonesome (1959) gave him Billy John and remains the best of the westerns. Shock Corridor (1963) is the one to show anyone who thinks of him purely as a comic sheriff, and he turns up in archive footage in a documentary about Samuel Fuller, which is the company he could keep.

Then, in his fifties, he got the part that erased the rest. Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard, from 1979, is a sheriff played as a permanently aggrieved child, all sputter and giggle, and Best committed to it without a shred of vanity, right through to a reunion film in 2000. The late career is friendly and small: Sounder (1972) before it, Nickelodeon (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Hooper and The End (both 1978), then character parts on In the Heat of the Night and B.L. Stryker. He also taught acting, wrote, directed and painted. He died in 2015.