This is the face of true grief.
Actor John Schneider allowed a photographer to capture his reaction to one of the most painful moments of his life — the death of his father.
Schneider, best known for playing Bo Duke in “The Dukes of Hazzard” and Jonathan Kent in “Smallville,” was posing for publicity stills for Tyler Perry’s new TV drama, “The Haves and the Have Nots,” which had its Season 2 premiere on the Oprah Winfrey Network this month.
The photographer, Jeremy Cowart, based in Nashville, Tenn., recalls on his blog, jeremycowart.com, the fun he had shooting with the “extremely professional, humble” Schneider on Nov. 16, 2013.
Scheider, 53, was all smiles, “goofing off” and doing impressions of actors and presidents. But his carefree manner changed once the shoot was finished.
“Hey, can you sneak a few more portraits of me?” he asked Cowart. “There’s something going on, and I just need a photo.”
Cowart agreed, and Schneider posed again — until tears began to overwhelm him. At first, the lensman thought it was acting. But after several more frames, he realized “it wasn’t an act. He was really somewhere else.”
Cowart put his camera down and, overcome by his subject’s emotion, gave him a hug.
Schneider whispered in his ear: “My dad died about an hour ago. I found out during our lunch break. And I wanted you to capture that for me.”
Schneider then walked up to Cowart’s screen, looked at the last shot, one of his head bowed with a pensive expression, and said, “That’s it. That’s my dad.”
“I was stunned. Shocked. And deeply moved, obviously,” writes Cowart, who founded the photographers movement Help-Portrait. “As a father myself, I wept for him.”
Schneider’s father, John Schneider Sr., an Air Force sergeant who ran an auto and aircraft upholstery business in the Westchester County hamlet of Katonah, died at age 83.
The two had a very close relationship, he said in an interview with Fathers.com in 2012.
“I’ve had a great dad,” he said. “I talk to him pretty often, although he lives in New York and I live in California. So we don’t go play golf every Saturday, although I’d really like that.”
Schneider continues to mourn, giving The Post this statement: “There is a hole in New York where my father used to be.”