Focus Features

Edward Everett Horton, perhaps the busiest working character actor in 30s and 40s comedy, was relentlessly cast as a respectable but nervous fellow, a man whose fidgety obsession with neatness and order bordered on being a sissy. Ironically, while this was just a character, the truth was not far away. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Horton grew up in a perfectly proper family. His grandfather was the noted author Edward Everett Hale (“The Man Without a Country”), and he dutifully studied business at Brooklyn Polytechnic and Columbia University before being bitten by the stage bug. At 20, he started appearing in vaudeville and Broadway shows, and then in 1919 he headed to Hollywood. With the advent of sound, Horton excelled, giving his mousy characters a quavering, faltering, sometimes falsetto, voice in such comedies as The Front Page (1931), Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). In the 60s, a whole new generation knew him as Roaring Chicken, the medicine man, on "F Troop" and as the voice of the animated segment "Fractured Fairy Tales.” While rarely a leading man, Horton always worked, joking once, “I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it.” In addition to playing a mama’s boy on screen, Horton really was one in real life. With his success he built an estate called “Belly Acres” in the San Fernando Valley for his mother, brothers, and himself. And he remained a bachelor his entire life, quipping, “I arouse nothing but respect, and not too much of that, in the opposite sex.” Much of this was just a smoke screen to hide his homosexuality. For years, he maintained a very private relationship with actor Gavin Gordon, even as he played in public the role of the sexless, bumbling bachelor.

Edward Everett Horton, perhaps the busiest working character actor in 30s and 40s comedy, was relentlessly cast as a respectable but nervous fellow, a man whose fidgety obsession with neatness and order bordered on being a sissy. Ironically, while this was just a character, the truth was not far away. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Horton grew up in a perfectly proper family. His grandfather was the noted author Edward Everett Hale (“The Man Without a Country”), and he dutifully studied business at Brooklyn Polytechnic and Columbia University before being bitten by the stage bug. At 20, he started appearing in vaudeville and Broadway shows, and then in 1919 he headed to Hollywood. With the advent of sound, Horton excelled, giving his mousy characters a quavering, faltering, sometimes falsetto, voice in such comedies as The Front Page (1931), Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). In the 60s, a whole new generation knew him as Roaring Chicken, the medicine man, on "F Troop" and as the voice of the animated segment "Fractured Fairy Tales.” While rarely a leading man, Horton always worked, joking once, “I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it.” In addition to playing a mama’s boy on screen, Horton really was one in real life. With his success he built an estate called “Belly Acres” in the San Fernando Valley for his mother, brothers, and himself. And he remained a bachelor his entire life, quipping, “I arouse nothing but respect, and not too much of that, in the opposite sex.” Much of this was just a smoke screen to hide his homosexuality. For years, he maintained a very private relationship with actor Gavin Gordon, even as he played in public the role of the sexless, bumbling bachelor.