FAREWELL, CAPED CRUSADER
Gotham mourns Adam West
Adam West, the actor best known for playing “Batman” on the classic ’60s TV show, died Friday after a battle with leukemia, his family said Saturday. He was 88.
West was not the first actor to play the Caped Crusader, or the crime-fighter’s millionaire alter-ego Bruce Wayne, but his campy portrayal is considered by many to be the gold standard.
“In my eyes there was only one real Batman — and that is and always will be Adam West,” Burt Ward, who played the hero’s trusty sidekick, Robin, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Born William West Anderson in Walla Walla, Wash., the chisel-jawed West moved to Hollywood in 1959 and got his feet wet with Western TV series like “Bonanza” and “Overland Trail.”
Seven years later, he scored the gig of a lifetime, after a producer saw his crime-fighting potential in his performance as Captain Quik in a Nestle commercial.
West first donned the Batsuit in 1966, subduing bad guys such as Cesar Romero’s Joker, Vincent Price’s Egghead (one of the only two villains to learn Batman’s true identity) and Burgess Meredith’s Penguin — and wooing a few too, such as Julie Newmar’s Catwoman.
By today’s superhero standards, West was an atypical Batman — straightlaced and doughy in his skintight spandex, compared to the buff — and much more serious — ver- sions of the character later played by Christian Bale and Ben Affleck.
And his character’s idiosyncratic observations were hardly the stuff of today’s action-movie stars. “Salt and corrosion. The infamous old enemies of the crime fighter,” he once mused.
West played the masked hero for three seasons and one film, and lent his smooth, deep voice to many Batman cartoons and video games. As recently as this year, he recorded the cartoon “Batman vs. TwoFace.”
While West appeared in nearly 50 films, he never escaped Batman’s shadow.
“You get terribly typecast playing a character like Batman,” he told The Associated Press three years ago.
He was offered the role of super-spy James Bond in 1970’s “Diamonds are Forever,” he wrote in his memoir, but turned it down.
Hollywood quickly took to Twitter to respond to West’s passing.
“#AdamWest was such a wonderful actor & so kind, I’m so lucky to have worked w/ him & tell him how much he meant to me & millions of fans,” tweeted Mark Hamill of “Luke Skywalker/Star Wars” fame.
West, who married three times, is survived by wife Marcelle Tagand Lear, four children and two stepkids.
“Our dad always saw himself as The Bright Knight, and aspired to make a positive impact on his fans’ lives,” the West family said in a statement. “He was and always will be our hero.”