Alan William Napier-Clavering

 Alan William Napier-Clavering (January 7, 1903 – August 8, 1988)

After a decade in West End theaters, he had a long film career first in Britain and then in Hollywood. But Napier finally became widely known for portraying Alfred the butler in the 1960s live-action Batman television series. He went to New York City in 1940 to co-star with Gladys George in Lady in Waiting. Though his film career had begun in Britain in the 1930s, he had very little success before the cameras until he arrived and joined the British community in Hollywood in 1941. There he spent time with such people as James Whale, a fellow ex-Oxford Player. He usually played dignified, sometimes WASPish roles of all sizes in such films as Random Harvest (1942), Cat People (1942), The Uninvited (1943), and House of Horrors (1946). In The Song of Bernadette, he played the ethically questionable psychiatrist who is hired to declare Bernadette mentally ill. He appeared in two Shakespeare films: the Orson Welles Macbeth, in which he played a priest that Welles added to the story, who spoke lines originally uttered by other characters, and MGM's Julius Caesar, as Cicero. He also played the vicious Earl of Warwick in Joan of Arc. In 1949, he made an appearance on the short-lived television anthology series Your Show Time as Sherlock Holmes, in an adaptation of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band". In the 1950s, he appeared on TV in four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and guest starred on Dale Robertson's NBC western series Tales of Wells Fargo. In 1966, he was the first to be cast in the Batman TV series, as Bruce Wayne's faithful butler Alfred, a role he played until the series' cancellation in 1968. Napier's career extended into the 1980s, with TV roles in such miniseries as QB VII and such weeklies as The Paper Chase. Napier suffered a stroke in 1987, hospitalized since June 1988, and had been gravely ill for several days, before his death of natural causes the following August. He is interred at Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles, CA.