American actor Edward Everett Horton was BOTD in 1886. Born in New York to a middle-class family, he studied at Oberlin College, before being expelled after throwing a dummy off the top of a building (panicking onlookers who thought he had committed suicide). He returned to New York, studying at Columbia University where he became involved in student theatre. He began his stage career in vaudeville, moving to Hollywood in 1919 where he appeared in silent films. He successfully transitioned to sound films, and became a mainstay of screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, appearing in The Front Page, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, The Merry Widow, The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Holiday and Arsenic and Old Lace. Known for his immaculate comic timing and trademark double-take, his roles were typically “saps”, sissies and bumbling fools, whose ambiguous sexuality provided comic relief and bolstered the heterosexual credentials of the leading man. His most queer-coded character was as “Aunt” Egbert in Top Hat, who plays with dolls, waxes nostalgic about his childhood pink pyjamas, and avoids the amorous affections of his female co-star. After World War Two, he worked primarily in radio and on television, best known for playing Chief Screaming Chicken in 1960s TV series Batman and as the narrator on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He had a late career comeback in comedies It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Sex and the Single Girl, before retiring to his farm in Encino, which he named “Belly Acres”. A lifelong bachelor, he lived with his mother and never discussed his personal life, stating in a 1968 interview that he’d not given up hope of marriage. He was rumoured to be romantically involved with fellow actor Gavin Gordon, though no evidence exists of any intimate relationship. He died in 1970 aged 84.