Victor Buono

Victor Buono was twenty-four when he played Edwin Flagg, the fleshy, mother-ridden pianist who answers Baby Jane Hudson's advertisement in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and the performance brought Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for what was effectively his first significant film role. It also set the terms for everything after. He was large, he had a trained and faintly amused voice with real bottom to it, and he could deliver a florid line as though he had written it himself, so casting directors handed him men twenty and thirty years older than he was and he made the arithmetic vanish.

The range inside that typecasting was wider than the reputation suggests. He was the brutal patriarch of the prologue in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, a deputy sheriff and a heavy in two mid-sixties star vehicles, a mutant in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and William Howard Taft in a White House miniseries. Television kept him busy from the late 1950s onward and holds most of the work: an anthology guest here, a villain of the week there, plus the recurring Mr. Schubert in Man from Atlantis.

What he is remembered for is King Tut on Batman, an Egyptology professor who takes a blow to the head and comes round convinced he is the pharaoh. It is genuinely funny work, camp on purpose, played by a man enjoying every syllable. He was briefly a recording artist too, and he worked steadily from his late teens until his death in 1982 at forty-three, which is why the filmography looks like that of a much older character actor.