Willie Best
William Best, known professionally as Willie Best or Sleep 'n' Eat, was an American television and film actor.
Best was one of the first African American film actors and comedians to become well known. In the 21st century, his work, like that of Stepin Fetchit, is sometimes reviled because he was often called upon to play stereotypically lazy, illiterate, and/or simple-minded characters in films. Of the 124 films he appeared in, he received screen credit in at least 77, an unusual feat for an African American bit player.
Stage
A native of Sunflower, Mississippi, Best reached Hollywood as a chauffeur for a vacationing couple. He decided to stay in the region and began his performing career with a traveling show in southern California. He was regularly hired as a character actor in Hollywood films after a talent scout discovered him on stage.Motion pictures
Willie Best appeared in more than one hundred films of the 1930s and 1940s. Although several sources state that for years he was billed only as "Sleep n' Eat", Best received credit under this moniker instead of his real name in only six movies: his first film as a bit player and in Up Pops the Devil, The Monster Walks, Kentucky Kernels and West of the Pecos, and Murder on a Honeymoon. He thereafter usually received credit as "Willie Best" or "William Best".In his early films, Best clearly imitated Stepin Fetchit, delivering dialogue slowly in a thick and almost incoherent dialect, and reacting to things with a pop-eyed stare and slack-jawed amazement or bewilderment. Best later refined his screen character, abandoning the Fetchit mannerisms but retaining his natural comic reactions and dialect. In reality he was far from the slow-witted clown he often portrayed; he was well aware of being typecast as "lazy darkey" characters: "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 bad parts... But what's an actor going to do? Either you do it or get out." Mitchell Leisen, who directed Willie Best in Suddenly It's Spring, described him as "the most natural actor I've ever seen." Comedian Bob Hope similarly acclaimed him as "the best actor I know", while the two were working together in 1940 on The Ghost Breakers.
File:Dangerous Money - Dickerson & Best.jpg|thumb|250px|Dudley Dickerson and Best in Dangerous Money
As a supporting actor, Best, like many black actors of his era, was regularly cast in domestic worker or service-oriented roles. He 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. 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. This also happened to white actors in small roles, but black actors were not credited even when their roles were larger. In more than 80 of his movies, he was given a proper character name, beginning with his second film.
He also 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. Actor Paul White, who played a young version of Best's "Hipp" in the first film, went on to play "Hipp" in the next three films; Best returned to the role in the last two.
Mantan Moreland, one of Willie Best's contemporaries, played "Birmingham Brown" the chauffeur in the Charlie Chan films. When Moreland took temporary leave of the series to tour in vaudeville, Willie Best took over Moreland's role in The [Red Dragon (film)|The Red Dragon] in 1945 and Dangerous Money in 1946. Best and Moreland appeared together in the Chan mystery Shanghai Chest in 1948.