I have specifically forbidden speculation as a qualifier for Pride Month in my columns. This can make it difficult to fill the slate, especially for dead women. However, there’s definitely speculation about certain people. And I have to admit that when I read “devout Catholic who died at 80 as a life-long bachelor,” I speculate. Now, of course, there are other reasons for remaining single, but between that and The Producers, I grant you, I speculate.

That he loved acting is not speculation. His first stage appearance was in Dublin in 1928; he was seven and in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even during World War II, he acted. He did a ton of work on the stage, some roles more noteworthy than others. He was the original Zoltan Karpathy in My Fair Lady, for one. He probably could’ve had a solid career doing just the stage, and certainly he was one of the people from My Fair Lady to be passed over for the movie. He wasn’t the only one or even the most notable one, but there it was.

Still, Hollywood did come calling eventually, though after an appearance in an Ealing comedy and a couple of other movies. He only did five movies in his life, three of which were in the ’50s. But he also had a movie in the ’60s that would’ve been a “if you knew him from nowhere else” appearance, when he was Roger De Bris in The Producers. It’s one of two stone-cold classics he was in, along with The Lavender Hill Mob.

Similarly, he didn’t do a lot of TV, but what TV he did, you’d remember. Maybe not The DuPont Show of the Month, granted, but some of the others. He was on a sitcom about Ivan the Terrible, weirdly. But he did 22 episodes of Fantasy Island, having stepped in after Hervé Villechaize left the show. And, of course, for 118 episodes, he was Mr. Belvedere, in one of the weird sitcoms of the ’80s. He was the butler to an average American family, having wacky hijinks with Bob Uecker, why not.

Saturday Night Live once did a bit of a convention celebrating “the guy who played Mr. Belevedere,” and that was a thing. I think it’s how most people think of him. And there are good reasons for that, really; most of his career was less notable, or else on the stage where you weren’t as likely to have had the chance to see him. Still, while it was a silly show, he wasn’t bad in it, and that’s more important than any speculation about his sexuality.

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