John Schneider

The first credit on this page is a crowd extra. John Schneider, born in Mount Kisco, New York in 1960, turns up uncredited as a cowboy in a crowd scene in Smokey and the Bandit in 1977, two years before The Dukes of Hazzard, which ran from 1979 to 1985, made him famous enough that nobody would mistake him for one again. Bo Duke came with a parallel career as a country singer through the same decade.

What is easy to miss is that his best work arrived twenty years later. Jonathan Kent on Smallville, which began in 2001, is a genuinely difficult assignment: a father who has to be decent without being dull, and who exists largely to hand a superhero his conscience. Schneider played him warm, tired and stubborn, and the series leaned on that more heavily than it leaned on most of its cast.

After that he became one of television's most employable utility men. Jim Cryer on Tyler Perry's The Haves and the Have Nots, a series that ran from 2013 to 2021, finally let him play somebody genuinely unpleasant. Around it sits a remarkable quantity of low-budget creature features, among them Lake Placid 2, Shark Swarm, Super Shark, Snow Beast and Ogre, plus guest runs on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Touched by an Angel, Nip/Tuck and Diagnosis Murder. He works constantly, which is its own kind of career and a rarer one than stardom.