- Born
- Died
- Nickname
- Sleep 'n' Eat
- Height6′ (1.83 m)
- One of the hard-working, unappreciated African-American actors of Hollywood's "Golden Era" who produced good work with what he was given. He starred alongside some of film's great comedians including the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Laurel and Hardy and three films with Shirley Temple. Best is sometimes confused with William "Pat" Best, a musician and writer of (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.. After a drug arrest ended his film career, he worked in television for a while before retiring to obscurity. He passed away at the Motion Picture Country Home and is buried in North Hollywood, California.
Best was one of the victims of the racist attitudes of the era, never given the opportunity to fully flex his comedic muscle beyond the stereotyped porter and janitor roles that dominated his career. Sadly he was also a victim of backlash for these same roles during the Civil Rights movement.
- IMDb mini biography by: Melanie C.
- Bob Hope referred to Best, as his comedic co-star in The Ghost Breakers (1940), as one of the finest talents he had ever worked with.
- He came to Hollywood serving as a chauffeur for a Mississippi white couple on vacation, and decided to stay and seek a career in show business.
- In his earliest film appearances, in the early 1930s, if he was given screen credit he was billed as "Sleep 'n' Eat".
- Perhaps best remembered as Algernon, the comic relief who introduces Humphrey Bogart to the bad luck dog, Pard, in Bogart's star-making role, High Sierra (1941).
- Yassuh!
- "I often think about these roles I have to play. Most of them are pretty broad. Sometimes I tell the director and he cuts out the real bad parts... But what's an actor going to do? Either you do it or get out." Interview, 1934.
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