Alan Napier

Alan Napier, born Alan William Napier-Clavering on 7 January 1903 in Birmingham, England, was an English actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television across six decades. His father, Claude Gerald Napier-Clavering, served as managing director of the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, and his mother, Millicent Mary, was the daughter of politician William Kenrick. The family were landed gentry, descended from Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier, and had owned Axwell Park near Gateshead until 1920. Napier had two older siblings, Mark and Mary Helen, and was a first cousin once removed of Neville Chamberlain, who served as British prime minister from 1937 to 1940.

Napier received his early education at Packwood Haugh School and Clifton College before training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 1925. He subsequently joined the Oxford Players, where he worked alongside John Gielgud and Robert Morley. His height of 6 feet 6 inches nearly cost him the position: J. B. Fagan had previously dismissed Tyrone Guthrie for being too tall, and Napier was interviewed and accepted while seated. Fagan honored the commitment when Napier stood and revealed he was taller still than Guthrie. Napier performed on the West End stage for ten years, from 1929 to 1939, and expressed a particular affinity for the work of George Bernard Shaw. In 1937 he appeared in a London revival of Heartbreak House supervised by Shaw himself.

Napier made his American stage debut opposite Gladys George as the romantic lead in Lady in Waiting, one of the Broadway productions also listed in his verified stage credits, which span 1940 to 1956 and additionally include Gertie and the drama Too Late the Phalarope. After relocating to Hollywood in 1941 and joining the British expatriate community there, which included fellow ex-Oxford Player James Whale, Napier found considerably more success on screen than he had in Britain. His American film appearances included Random Harvest and Cat People, both in 1942, The Uninvited in 1944, and The Song of Bernadette in 1943, in which he portrayed the psychiatrist engaged to declare Bernadette mentally ill. He played the Earl of Warwick in Joan of Arc in 1948 and took roles in two Shakespearean films: Orson Welles's Macbeth in 1948, in which he played a priest whose dialogue Welles assembled from lines originally spoken by other characters, and MGM's Julius Caesar in 1953, in which he appeared as Cicero. In 1964 he played Sean Connery's father in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie.

On television, Napier appeared in 1949 on the anthology series Your Show Time, playing Sherlock Holmes in an adaptation of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." During the 1950s he guest starred in multiple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and appeared on the NBC western Tales of Wells Fargo. From 1962 to 1963 he held a recurring role as General Steele on the situation comedy Don't Call Me Charlie.

In 1965 Napier became the first actor cast in the Batman television series, taking the role of Alfred Pennyworth, butler to Bruce Wayne. He held the role for the duration of the series, from 1966 until its cancellation in 1968. His television work continued into the following decade with appearances in the miniseries QB VII in 1974, The Bastard in 1978, and Centennial in 1979, as well as the drama The Paper Chase. He retired in 1981 at the age of 78.

In early 1988, despite being confined to a wheelchair, Napier appeared on The Late Show as part of a reunion of surviving Batman cast members. His co-star Yvonne Craig noted the program was overbooked, and host Ross Shafer cut Napier off mid-story after asking him a trivial question. Napier did not take part in a subsequent cast reunion before his death. He suffered a stroke in 1987, was hospitalized from June 1988, and died of natural causes on 8 August 1988 at the Berkeley East Convalescent Hospital in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 85.

Napier was married twice. His second wife, Aileen Dickens Hawksley, was a great-granddaughter of the novelist Charles Dickens. Hawksley's daughter from a prior marriage, actress Jennifer Raine, was the mother of Brian Forster, known for playing Chris Partridge on the 1970s television series The Partridge Family. In the early 1970s Napier wrote a three-volume autobiography that remained unpublished at the time; he attributed this to having neither committed a major crime nor been known to have slept with any famous actresses. McFarland Press published the work in 2015 under the title Not Just Batman's Butler, with Napier's original text annotated and updated by James Bigwood.