Ceaser Romeo (1907-1994)
Signed original vintage still.
Romero was better known as the white-faced, green-haired, cackling villain "The Joker" of the camp 1960s TV series "Batman" (1966)
"I was very suprised when Bill Dozier called me and and said he was doing a series called 'Batman' and the important characters were the villains. They had done the first two with the Riddler and the Penguin with Frank Gorshin and Burgess Meredith, and now they were ready to do the third, and the villain was the Joker. He said,'I would like you to play the part.' So, I said I would like to read the script and know what it is all about. So he said, 'Come on over to the studio, and I will show you the film of the first episode.' Of course, it was great. I said, 'Let me read this Joker part, and if it is as good as the first one, hell yes, I will do it.' So, I read the script, and I thought it was a gas, and I said, 'Sure, I'll do it.'"
"Why Dozier wanted me for 'Batman' I'll never know, because I asked his wife, Ann Rutherford, 'Why did Bill think of me for this part?' She said, 'I don't know, Butch. He said he saw you in something, and he said, "He's the one I want to play the Joker."' I haven't the slightest idea what it was he saw me in, because I had never done anything like it before."
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Suave, handsome, dark-haired Latin, whose grandfather was Jose Martí, the liberator of Cuba. Romero broke into show business as a professional dancer, and later turned to acting. He came to Hollywood in 1934 and was seldom idle for the next sixty years, though he never became a full-fledged star-a curse, he felt, of being thought of as a "Latin lover." In fact, he was a very capable and surprisingly versatile actor. He played a suspect in The Thin Man (1934), one of Marlene Dietrich's luckless lovers in The Devil Is a Woman (1935), a tough-as-nails gangster in Show Them No Mercy! (1935), an Afghan leader confronted by Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie (1937), Doc Halliday (sic) in Frontier Marshal (1939), and the Cisco Kid in a half-dozen B movies made in 1940-41 at his home studio, 20th Century-Fox.
He was a staple in Fox musicals of the 1940s, and even got to dance with Betty Grable in Springtime in the Rockies (1942). In 1947 he got one of his all-time best roles, as the Spanish conqueror Cortés in Captain From Castile (1947), then showed a flair for knockabout slapstick as an oafish acrobat in Julia Misbehaves (1948). But by the 1950s, with the studios slowing down, his career slid. There were still occasional plums, like the Vegas gangster he played in Ocean's Eleven (1960), and the comic villains he essayed in a handful of Disney comedies, including Now You See Him, Now You Don't (1972) and The Strongest Man in the World (1975). By then Romero had become a familiar face on TV, where he enjoyed latter-day fame in the unlikely role of The Joker on "Batman" (1966-68) and in the 1966 feature, Batmanit inspired. Having starred in his own shortlived series, "Passport to Danger" (1954-55), he joined the cast of the hit show "Falcon Crest" in 1985 (at the age of 78) as Jane Wyman's love interest, and stayed for two seasons. He remained active, performing and hosting vintage films on cable TV, to the very end of his life.
OTHER FILMS INCLUDE: 1935: The Good Fairy, Cardinal Richelieu, Diamond Jim 1936: Public Enemy's Wife, 15 Maiden Lane 1937: Dangerously Yours 1938: Happy Landing, My Lucky Star 1939: The Little Princess, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, The Cisco Kid and the Lady 1940: Viva Cisco Kid, Lucky Cisco Kid 1941: Weekend in Havana, The Great American Broadcast 1942: Orchestra Wives, Tales of Manhattan 1943: Coney Island 1948: That Lady in Ermine 1949: The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend 1951: The Lost Continent, FBI Girl 1952: The Jungle 1954: Vera Cruz 1955: The Americano 1956: Around the World in Eighty Days 1957: The Story of Mankind 1963: The Castillian, Donovan's Reef 1964: A House Is Not a Home 1965: Marriage on the Rocks 1968: Skidoo, Hot Millions, Madigan's Million 1969: Midas Run, Crooks and Coronets 1970: The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes 1973: The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe 1976: Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood 1985: Lust in the Dust 1988: Mortuary Academy 1989: Street Law 1990: Simple Justice.
