Six foot six, gaunt and precise, Alan Napier spent forty years playing the Englishman Hollywood kept on hand: the butler, the colonel, the professor, the lord. He did it well, nearly always in small parts, until a comedy made him famous at sixty-three.
Fi1m perspective
He stands very still, speaks quietly and with care, and lets his height do the rest. The manner is the same whether the man is kind or up to something, and that was the point of hiring him: the audience has to wait to find out. Directors used him for gentlemen, noblemen, senior officers, professors and butlers, and in a Hollywood thriller of the 1940s a tall Englishman who is polite to everyone is either the one person to trust or the one to watch.
He trained at RADA, graduating in 1925, spent a decade on the West End stage and left for America at the start of the war. What followed was the long, unglamorous career of a character actor who was rarely off screen and rarely on it for long. He is Dr Scott in The Uninvited (1944), a priest in Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948) and Cicero in Julius Caesar (1953), where the voice and the bearing were exactly what the part wanted. Alfred Hitchcock used him five times, latterly as Mr Rutland in Marnie (1964). Disney gave him Sir Pellinore in The Sword in the Stone (1963), a role in which the height was no use and the voice did everything. A good many of his other appearances went uncredited.
Then, in 1966, at sixty-three, he was offered a butler in a television programme based on a comic he had never read. "It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard of," he said later, and took it. He was the first actor cast, appeared in all 120 episodes and came along for the 1966 film, in which Adam West plays Batman with a straight face for 105 minutes while four villains, a rubber shark and a bomb do their worst. We found the film funny for an hour and then the same hour again, and what struck us on that second hour was that Napier's Alfred is the one person in it who never appears to know a joke is being made. He hands over a bat-gadget in the tone of a man handing over a coat. The less he did, the funnier we found him, and by the end he was doing almost nothing.
The reservation is the one his filmography makes for itself. He was seldom given length, so there is no film in which he has to carry a scene for more than a page, and no way of knowing what he might have done with one. Watch him in the 1966 film, where the size of the part finally matches the size of the man, and the next time an English butler opens a door in a black-and-white thriller and says almost nothing, look up.
Biography
Alan Napier (born Alan William Napier-Clavering) was an English actor. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked for a decade in London West End theatre before pursuing a film career, first in Britain and later in Hollywood.
He appeared in films including Cat People (1942), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Sword in the Stone (1963), Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964), Marnie (1964) and Batman (1966) as Alfred. His television credits include episodes of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Napier is best remembered for portraying Alfred Pennyworth in the 1960s live-action Batman television series, a role he reprised in the 1966 feature film. He was a first cousin once removed of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
