Burt Ward Biography

Burt Ward: Biography

Bert John Gervis, Jr. was born July 6, 1945 in Los Angeles. When he started acting, he changed the "e" in Bert to "u", feeling that it added more zip to his character. Finally, he adopted the last name of Ward, his mother's maiden name.

Landing the role of Robin - a feat he accomplished without reading a single Batman comic book - proved to be both a blessing and a curse. The role propelled him to instant fame. But it had its drawbacks as well. For instance, since his face was more exposed than Batman's, he had to perform his own stunts - even when costar Adam West got to use a stunt double.

The role of Robin also left Burt virtually unemployable when Batman closed. For he was too recognizable as Robin. His only notable appearance since was the role of teacher Dick Murphy in the low budget and soft-core porn film Virgin High. And even Dick Murphy couldn't shake the Robin type cast, as the "Holy" expletive was inserted libereally throughout his lines.

Burt: We believe you can have all the kind of entertainment you want appeal to all ages.(edit)
Burt: Our characters were antiseptic but we weren't. And if you remember what we did on Batman, as the scripts were written very funny, we played them very straight.(edit)
Burt: On our show, I must tell you, it was... the 60s was a period of time when everything was free love. People made love to each other. It was a very open life, you know?(edit)
Burt: My book is very wild. But you know during the period of Batman, that there were thousands of Batman and Robin costumes sold and these weren't just for kids.(edit)
Burt: Maybe I'm a little too harsh on Adam. Actually, to be more descriptive, he was more like a killer whale in a world of plankton. Together we had this wild time.(edit)
Burt: Let me tell you something. I'll give you the whole story in a nutshell. In the 1950s there was a psychiatrist that felt that the Batman- Robin relationship represented a wish dream of two homosexuals.(edit)
Burt: I mean when you come into the set at 7:30 in the morning and you come out of make-up and the first thing you know, the ladies start coming into our dressing rooms at 7:45.(edit)
Burt: I like to protect children. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having adult programming for mature adults that can selectively decide what they want to watch and what they don't want to watch.(edit)
Burt: I have two children. I have a daughter 29, and a daughter four. They are 25 years apart, so you speak about generations and I must tell you, I have a philosophy and that is every 25 years I'm going to sire another child.(edit)
Burt: I had the greatest time of my life! Even working with Adam, who I really adore, okay, but who absolutely drove me crazy upstaging me, constantly blocking me from the camera, that I was always having to be on my toes.(edit)
Burt: Even in Los Angeles, where we lived, when we would date somebody or go out with them, if we went out with somebody else the next night, we often found that women were banging on our windows while we were bedded down with other women!(edit)
Burt: We found that just by the way we stood, affected women dramatically, and if you look at our show, you'll see that we always stood with our legs open our fists on hips and our bat bulges forward, which had a profound effect on women!(edit)
Burt: Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience. (edit)
Burt: You know, and I will say this though, when we did put on our costumes, and you look at the opulence of the Wayne Manor and the impenetrable dark cave and they spend so many long hours together. (edit)
Burt: You know, it's a different world now, but to skip ahead and really answer your question, only in the last five years did I find what I call holy maturity, finding the balance, finding the right person in my life so that I could live a normal life.(edit)