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Thread: Adam West...dead

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    Adam West...dead

    Adam West, Straight-Faced Star of TV's 'Batman,' Dies at 88

    The actor struggled to find work after the campy superhero series was canceled, but he rebounded with voiceover gigs, including one as the mayor of Quahog on 'Family Guy.'

    Adam West, the ardent actor who managed to keep his tongue in cheek while wearing the iconic cowl of the Caped Crusader on the classic 1960s series Batman, has died. He was 88.

    West, who was at the pinnacle of pop culture after Batman debuted in January 1966, only to see his career fall victim to typecasting after the ABC show flamed out, died Friday night in Los Angeles after a short battle with leukemia, a family spokesperson said.

    West died peacefully surrounded by his family and is survived by his wife Marcelle, six children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

    “Our dad always saw himself as The Bright Knight and aspired to make a positive impact on his fans' lives. He was and always will be our hero,” his family said in a statement.

    After struggling for years without a steady job, the good-natured actor reached a new level of fame when he accepted an offer to voice the mayor of Quahog — named Adam West; how’s that for a coincidence! — on Seth MacFarlane’s long-running Fox animated hit Family Guy.

    On the big screen, West played a wealthy Main Line husband who meets an early end in Paul Newman’s The Young Philadelphians (1959), was one of the first two humans on the Red Planet in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and contributed his velvety voice to the animated Redux Riding Hood (1997), which received an Oscar nomination for best short film.

    Raised on a ranch outside Walla Walla, Wash., West caught the attention of Batman producer William Dozier when he played Captain Quik, a James Bond-type character with a sailor’s cap, in commercials for Nestle’s Quik.

    West, who had appeared in many Warner Bros. television series as a studio contract player, was filming the spaghetti Western The Relentless Four (1965) in Europe at the time. He returned to the States to meet with Dozier, “read the pilot script and knew after 20 pages that it was the kind of comedy I wanted to do,” he said in a 2006 interview with the Archive of American Television.

    He signed a contract on the spot, only asking that he be given the chance to approve who would play his sidekick, Robin the Boy Wonder. (He would OK the casting of Burt Ward, who had a brown belt in karate but zero acting experience).

    “The tone of our first show, by Lorenzo Semple Jr., was one of absurdity and tongue in cheek to the point that I found it irresistible,” West said. “I think they recognized that in me from what they’d seen me do before. I understood the material and brought something to it.

    “You can’t play Batman in a serious, square-jawed, straight-ahead way without giving the audience the sense that there’s something behind that mask waiting to get out, that he’s a little crazed, he’s strange.”

    The hunky Lyle Waggoner (later of The Carol Burnett Show) and Peter Deyell also tested to play the Gotham City crime fighters, but West and Ward clearly were superior, and Batman debuted at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 12, 1966, a Wednesday.

    The cliffhanger episode would be resolved the very next night — Same Bat-time! Same Bat-channel! The show was originally intended to last an hour, but ABC split it up when it had two time slots available on its primetime schedule.

    West said that he played Batman “for laughs, but in order to do [that], one had to never think it was funny. You just had to pull on that cowl and believe that no one would recognize you.”

    The series, filmed in eye-popping bright colors in an era of black-and-white and featuring a revolving set of villains like the Riddler (Frank Gorshin), Joker (Cesar Romero), Penguin (Burgess Meredith) and Catwoman (Julie Newmar), was an immediate hit; the Thursday installment was No. 5 in the Nielsen ratings for the 1965-66 season, and the Wednesday edition was No. 10.

    Batman was nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding comedy series in its first year, losing out to CBS’ The Dick Van Dyke Show. A 20th Century Fox movie was rushed into production and played in theaters in the summer before season two kicked off in September 1966.

    However, the popularity of the show soon plummeted, and Batman — despite the addition of Yvonne Craig as Batgirl — was canceled in March 1968 after its third season.

    West quickly struggled to find work, forced to make appearances in his cape and cowl at car shows and carnivals and in such obscure films as The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971), written by Semple, and The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (1980). He and his family downsized, leaving their home in the tony Pacific Palisades for Ketchum, Idaho.

    “The people who were hiring, the people who were running the studios, running the shows, were dinosaurs,” the actor said in the 2013 documentary Starring Adam West. “They thought Batman was a big accident, that there was no real creative thought, expertise or art behind it. They were wrong.”

    He returned to voice his iconic character in such cartoons as The New Adventures of Batman, Legends of the Superheroes, SuperFriends: The Legendary Super Powers Show and The Simpsons, and Warner Bros.’ long-awaited DVD release of ABC’s Batman in 2014 brought him back into the Bat Signal’s spotlight.

    He was born William West Anderson in Seattle on Sept. 19, 1928, the second of two sons. His father, Otto, was a wheat farmer; his mother, Audrey, was a pianist and opera singer.

    West attended an all-boys high school, then graduated with a major in English literature from Whitman College. During his senior year, he worked for a local radio station, doing everything from Sunday morning religion shows to the news.

    He also starred in a couple of plays at the local theater. “I found that I could move an audience and I was appreciated,” he said.

    In the Army, West served as an announcer on American Forces Network television, then worked as the station manager at Stanford while he was a graduate student.

    He got a job at a McClatchy station in Sacramento, Calif., then moved to Hawaii, where he hosted a two-hour weekday show in the late 1950s with a diaper-wearing chimp named Peaches. (West said he once interviewed William Holden as the actor was passing through.)

    West got a contract at Warner Bros. at $150 a week and was placed in one of the studio’s TV series — Colt .45, Maverick, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Cheyenne, etc. — pretty much every week.

    He got his first regular TV role when he played Det. Sgt. Steve Nelson under the command of Robert Taylor on the 1959-62 ABC/NBC series The Detectives, coming aboard when that show expanded to one hour in color.

    After he split with Warner Bros., West showed up in such forgettable films as Geronimo (1962) starring Chuck Connors, Tammy and the Doctor (1963) with Sandra Dee and in The Three Stooges film The Outlaws Is Coming (1965) before Batman changed his life forever.

    He later starred in a rejected 1991 NBC pilot episode called Lookwell — written by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel — in which he portrayed a once-famous TV detective who thinks he can solve crimes in real life.

    Then came the gig on MacFarlane’s Family Guy.

    “I had done a pilot with Seth that he had written for me. It turned out we had the same kind of comic sensibilities and got along well,” he said in a 2012 interview. “When Family Guy came around and Seth became brilliantly successful, he decided to call me and see what I was doing. He asked if I would like to come aboard as the mayor, and I thought it would be neat to do something sort of absurd and fun.”

    The documentary Starring Adam West culminates with him receiving a star on The Hollywood Hall of Fame in 2012.

    He married Marcelle in 1970; they met when she was the wife of the Lear Jet founder and they posed for a publicity photo at Santa Monica Airport, with him in his Batman costume. (They each had two children from their previous marriages, then added a couple of their own.)

    When Batman was canceled, “The only thing I thought is that it would be the end of me, and it was for a bit,” he told an audience at Comic-Con in 2014. “But then I realized that what we created in the show … we created this zany, lovable world.

    “I look around and I see the adults — I see you grew up with me, and you believe in the adventure. I never believed this would happen, that I would be up here with illustrious people like yourselves. I’m so grateful! I’m the luckiest actor in the world, folks, to have you still hanging around.”

    http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...an-star-832264
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    RIP Batman. It's good he had a nice career renaissance on Family Guy even though I never watched it...
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    Bummer. Watched the show every Sat morning...
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    Believe it or not, one of the last things he did (apart from the Family Guy role) was a new Batman movie with original Robin Burt Ward in 2016.

    It was animated, of course. As both of those guys were a bit old to put on the old batsuits......



    Rest in peace, Caped Crusader
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    West was a hack and a ham, but for people of a certain age he was OUR hack and ham. I must have seen every Batman episode at least twice in syndication growing up in the 1970s.
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    Two things you probably didn't know about Adam West.

    1) At the height of his fame, he had 8 women a night sliding down his "Bat pole".
    2) He was offered the James Bond role after Sean Connery quit, but declined, because he believed 007 should always be British.

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ‘Batman’ star Adam West had sex with eight women a night
    By Grant Rollings, The Sun


    Holy family viewing, Batman — it turns out the Caped Crusader’s fetching satin pants spent a lot of time on the floor.

    Adam West, who died on Saturday at age 88, became a TV legend for his camped-up portrayal of the hero in the ’60s.

    But behind the mask was a sex-mad actor who slept with up to eight women a night — and turned to booze when the show was axed.

    He and co-star Burt Ward, who played sidekick Robin, also romped with eager groupies in their dressing rooms in between scenes.

    In fact, West discovered the only limits to his bedroom batpowers were those caused by his famous costume.

    The actor explained years later: “Because of the physical limitations of the costume, you gotta have quickies.”

    And he had an awful lot of them, as well as dates with fellow stars including actress sisters Natalie and Lana Wood, and Raquel Welch.

    West explained: “Burt and I were like kids in a candy store. It was the Swinging Sixties with free love and women threw themselves at us. I remember one night with eight different women. Orgy is a harsh word, but it was eight at one time. I’d have young female co-stars in my dressing room at 7:45 in the morning.”

    In fact, West did once turn up at what he described as an “orgy” in Hollywood with Frank Gorshin, who played “Batman” baddie The Riddler.

    But they were thrown out for behaving like their TV alter-egos and making everyone laugh.

    He said: “We walked in and it was an orgy. So I immediately went into the Batman character, and Frank went into the Riddler character, because we were getting the big giggles. It was so funny to us, what we walked into. And we were kicked out. We were expelled from the orgy.”

    Meanwhile, trusty Boy Wonder Ward, who is now 71, claimed West was definitely the ringleader when it came to their own adventures.

    He recalled decades later: “When I entered ‘Batman’ as a naive 20-year-old who had only dated a couple of girls, I met Adam West, who immediately introduced me to the wildest sexual debauchery that you can imagine. We often found that women were banging on our windows while we were bedded down with other women.”

    He added: “We’re talking about wild times in the dressing rooms, on the set, between the shots, in the lunch wagon. And then of course, doing the personal appearances on the weekend, that’s where it really got wild. And I have to be honest with you, we became like sexual vampires.”

    He added that the costumes seem to be part of the lure for women: “If you look at our show, you’ll see that we always stood with our legs open, our fists on hips and our bat bulges forward, which had a profound effect on women.”

    West was 37 years old and twice divorced when he was offered the role that would define his life.

    After years of small roles, he was deemed to be “Batman” material after bosses saw him playing an 007-type spy in a Nesquik commercial.

    When the show hit screens in 1966, he and Ward became overnight sensations, in what was the most expensive show on television at the time.

    It was also one of the funniest, with its surreal double entendres.

    In a BBC interview in tribute to his late friend, Ward said: “We were playing it on multiple levels, we were playing with our audience. For the kids it was serious hero worship, for the adults it’s the nostalgia, the comic book, and for that very difficult audience at that time to capture, the teenagers and the college kids, it was the insinuations, the double entendres, all the things that nobody had ever done with an audience.”

    But in 1968, after just three seasons and 120 episodes, Batman was defeated by the most fearsome breed of arch-villains — bean counters.

    The show was axed, its ratings dropped and deals with other stations fell through.

    For West, being famous for wearing his underpants on the outside and for his joyous sense of kitsch did not translate into new job offers.

    One exception, incredibly, was an offer in 1970 to take over from Sean Connery as the new James Bond.

    But he turned down the role because he believed that the secret agent should be British.

    It was a mistake. Despite a few bit parts, he soon found himself reduced to appearing in safety ads and schlepping around for paid personal appearances.

    The lowest point was being shot out of a cannon at a carnival in Indiana dressed in his famous outfit.

    West said later: “I was doing things I wasn’t very comfortable doing. I became very self-destructive. That came from being disillusioned and frustrated. I was bitter when I realized ‘Batman’ had caused me to lose a lot of roles afterwards.”

    He turned increasingly to booze, triggering behavior so bad that he was even barred from the posh ski resort of Aspen, Colorado, for life.

    Heavy drinking even almost ruined a meeting with Pope Paul VI.

    West recalled the morning he was to meet the pontiff: “I woke up with the worst hangover of my life. I made it to the Vatican, and I was at the back of this line of people who each knelt down to kiss his ring. Then it was my turn. He put out his hand. I realized that, if I knelt down, I wouldn’t be able to get up again, I was so hung over.”

    Rather than kneeling, he bowed his head. At this point, the starstruck pope cried: “Oh, Signor West. I have seen all of your shows.”

    His fall from grace also led to depression — something that, along with alcoholism, ran in his family.

    The young West, born Billy West Anderson, had a troubled upbringing in rural Walla Walla, in Washington state.

    His opera singer mom, Audrey, had given up her career when she married West’s farmer dad, Otto, and regretted it.

    She became an alcoholic, and when West was 12, he found her in bed with the local preacher.

    One of West’s six children, daughter Nina, once said of Audrey: “There is a curse running through our family. Alcohol and manic depression. That’s what she suffered from.”

    By the time West was 15, his parents had divorced and he was living in Seattle with his mother.

    At 22, he wed Billie Lou Yeager, but they divorced after six years. In 1957, he wed second wife Ngahra Frisbie. That marriage ended in 1962.

    It was only in 1970, when he married Marcelle Tagland Lear, that he found lasting love. They remained together until his death.

    And over time, the actor, who amassed a $25 million fortune from rerun fees and personal appearances, also came to terms with being known “only” as Batman.

    He even starred in a 2003 TV movie, “Return To The Batcave,” with Ward and a host of former co-stars.

    He explained: “I decided that since so many people love Batman, I might as well love it too. So I began to re-engage myself with Batman. And I saw the comedy. I saw the love people had for it, and I just embraced it.”

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