1. William Best, known professionally as Willie Best or Sleep 'n' Eat, was an American television and film actor.
16 Facts About Willie Best
1. 2.
Willie Best decided to stay in the region and began his performing career with a traveling show in southern California.
3.
Willie Best was regularly hired as a character actor in Hollywood films after a talent scout discovered him on stage.
4.
Willie Best appeared in more than one hundred films of the 1930s and 1940s.
5.
Willie Best later refined his screen character, abandoning the Fetchit mannerisms but retaining his natural comic reactions and dialect.
6.
Willie Best was often seen making a brief comic turn as a hotel, airline, or train porter, as well as an elevator operator, custodian, butler, valet, waiter, deliveryman, and once as a launch pilot.
7.
Willie Best received screen credit most of the time, which was unusual for "bit players"; most in the 1930s and 1940s were not accorded due credit.
8.
Willie Best played the character of "Hipp" in three of RKO's six Scattergood Baines films with Guy Kibbee: Scattergood Baines, Scattergood Survives a Murder, and Cinderella Swings It in 1943.
9.
Mantan Moreland, one of Willie Best's contemporaries, played "Birmingham Brown" the chauffeur in the Charlie Chan films.
10.
When Moreland took temporary leave of the series to tour in vaudeville, Willie Best took over Moreland's role in The Red Dragon in 1945 and Dangerous Money in 1946.
11.
Willie Best was fond of using recreational narcotics, which resulted in at least two well-publicized arrests.
12.
Willie Best was rescued from professional oblivion by veteran producer Hal Roach, who regarded Best as one of the greatest talents he had ever met.
13.
Willie Best became familiar to early-TV audiences as Charlie, the elevator operator on CBS's My Little Margie, from 1953 to 1955.
14.
Willie Best played Billy Slocum in the syndicated drama Waterfront.
15.
Willie Best died on February 27,1962, at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California, of cancer at age 45.
16.
Willie Best was buried on March 5,1962, at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery.