“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant — even I want to be Cary Grant.”

Bolger’s flailing rubber legs made sense in The Wizard of Oz.

Scream­ingly funny, yet type­cast forever as Ted Baxter.

As Batman, he disclaimed heroism without undermining it.

She excelled at rapacious clingers, albatrosses, and bad mothers.

“You just write yourself the part, and then you play it.”

A stark contrast in mascara and morality!

His spooky-measured voice evoked a civilized darkness.

Immortal, like a surgical version of H. Rider Haggard’s SHE.

France had Existentialism; England had Hancock.

He let you know authority was a crock, even when he was the one holding it.

The boozy, self-absorbed Patsy Stone is one of TV’s greatest characters.

“I felt my job was not to become a good bass player.”

He couldn’t have been more perfect if he’d been put together in a lab.

He was a transmedia personality before the word’s invention.

Genre actors can be asked to play roles that are seven kinds of impossible.

His role as Harold made him an icon: flattened, but illuminated and sacred.

Her steely eroticism lent a sense of refinement to depraved encounters.

“There has never been anything like this before in human society.”

He generated fields of pure unexpected looniness.

A lost, louche world of hair-tossing karate chops and sexy banter.

He may be the best put-on artist since Andy Kaufman.

He suffers exactly enough to make the joke.

A high school dropout who learned his trade on the Borscht Belt…