Ian Abercrombie has been best known
since the mid-'90s for his work in character roles.
Principally playing stuffy upper-crust types, including
Mr. Pitt, Elaine's employer on Seinfeld, the staid
auctioneer in the climactic sequence of Mouse Hunt,
and Alfred the Butler in the series Birds of Prey.
Ian was born in 1936 to a working-class English family,
and he showed a natural interest in performing from an early
age, taking up tap dancing as a boy. At 17, he left for
New York and pursued the beginnings of a career on stage
-- among his early engagements, he appeared in a 1955 production
of Stalag 17 starring Jason Robards Jr., and he
understudied Roddy McDowall in a stock production of Bell,
Book and Candle that also starred Maria Riva, the daughter
of Marlene Dietrich.
He did a short stint in the army, in Special Services,
where he directed plays as well as acting in them. A trip
to California for a production of a play about W.C. Fields
that never materialized ended up putting Abercrombie into
movies, and over the next few years he played small roles
in pictures like Von Ryan's Express, They Shoot
Horses, Don't They?, The Molly Maguires, and
Young Frankenstein, as well as leading parts in
theatrical productions of The Vortex and Crucifer
of Blood.
Abercrombie was working steadily for most of the 1980s
and beyond, appearing in such movies as Army of Darkness,
The Wild Wild West, and The Lost World.
It was with his portrayal on Seinfeld of Mr. Pitt
-- lovably eccentric and just sufficiently full of himself
to put Julia Louis-Dreyfuss' Elaine on the defensive --
that Abercrombie became an actor whose name and face were
remembered by the general public. He remained active on
prime time television portraying Alfred the Butler in the
Warner Bros. television series Birds of Prey, while
also doing a huge amount of voice-over and radio work, as
well as a one-man show entitled Jean Cocteau -- A Mirror
Image.
