Victor Buono

Victor Charles Buono (February 3, 1938 – January 1, 1982) was an American actor, comic, and briefly a recording artist. He was known for playing the villain King Tut in the television series Batman (1966–1968) and musician Edwin Flagg in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the latter of which earned him Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations. He was a busy actor from his late teens until his death at the age of 43 and, with his large size and sonorous voice, he made a career of playing men much older than he actually was.

Buono was the son of Victor F. Buono. His father was a former police officer and bail bondsman who was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit robbery in 1959. Released on parole after seven years but forced to serve a further sentence due to a previous conviction for bird smuggling, Victor Sr. continued to manage the affairs of his son while in prison.

Buono started appearing on local radio and television stations, and at age 18 joined the Globe Theater Players in San Diego. The director had confidence in Buono and cast him in Volpone, A Midsummer Night's Dream and other Globe presentations. He received good notices for his various Shakespearean roles and in modern plays such as The Man Who Came to Dinner and Witness for the Prosecution.^{[citation needed]}

In the summer of 1959, a talent scout from Warner Bros. saw the heavy-set Buono play Falstaff at the Globe and took him to Hollywood for a screen test. Buono made his first network TV appearance playing the bearded poet Bongo Benny in an episode of 77 Sunset Strip. Over the next few years, he played menacing heavies in series on TV and appeared on The Untouchables. After appearing in a few uncredited film roles, he was cast by director Robert Aldrich in the psychological horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). The film starred Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and Buono played the hapless musical accompanist Edwin Flagg, a performance for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture.

Shortly after What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Buono appeared in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) as Big Sam Hollis, the father of Bette Davis, who played the title role. The film was also directed by Aldrich. In the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Buono portrayed the High Priest Sorak, and in The Strangler, a film based on the actual Boston Strangler Murders of the time, he portrayed Leo Kroll.

He also appeared in 4 for Texas (1963), Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), The Silencers (1966), Who's Minding the Mint? (1967), Target: Harry (1969), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), The Mad Butcher (1972) and The Evil (1978) as the Devil himself, clad in a white suit.

Buono also had many television roles. He played the recurring role of Count Manzeppi in The Wild Wild West and also played unrelated characters in that series' premiere episode and in the second and final Wild Wild West reunion film More Wild Wild West (1980).

Buono was cast to play villains of various ethnic origins on many television programs between 1960 and 1970. He was cast twice in 1960 in the western series The Rebel, starring Nick Adams, in the episodes "Blind Marriage" and "The Earl of Durango". In 1962, he played Melanthos Moon in an episode of The Untouchables, titled "Mr. Moon", in which he played a San Francisco art and antique dealer who hijacked a supply of the paper used for printing United States currency. In a 1963 episode of the same series, titled The Gang War, he played Pamise Surigao, a liquor smuggler competing with the Chicago mob.