Horton was born in Brooklyn, New York (then an independent city), in 1886. He was the son of Edward Everett Horton, a printer and foreman in the New York Times composing room, and Isabella Diack. (His paternal grandfather named his six sons after famous Americans and included Edward Everett, the orator and politician, because he preferred his two-hour address at Gettysburg, Pa. , on Nov. 19, 1863, to Abraham Lincoln's. )
Horton graduated from Boy's High School in Brooklyn and attended Baltimore City College, Oberlin College, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and Columbia College.
Despite his parents' desire that he become a teacher, show business appealed to him more than academic pursuits, and he directed and performed in amateur productions at Oberlin and Columbia. Leaving Columbia in 1907 without a degree, Horton sang and danced in the chorus of several Broadway musicals, eventually joining the Dempsey Light Opera Company on Staten Island, which performed Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In 1908, he joined Louis Mann's Broadway company as a stage manager. Watching the famous actor-impresario from the wings, Horton learned timing and dramatic characterization. Mann gave him bit parts and walk-ons, and in 1910, Horton made his Broadway debut as a butler in Mann's production of The Cheater.
Horton worked up to romantic and juvenile leads when in 1912 he joined Philadelphia's Orpheum Players at the Chestnut Street Theatre, reputedly the best stock company of its day. Here and in long engagements with stock and road companies from 1914 to 1919, he perfected an acting style appropriate to drawing-room comedies and farces. In 1919, Thomas Wilkes hired him as a leading man for his production company at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles. For forty-four weeks in 1923, he played the title role in his own production of Booth Tarkington's Clarence. Horton enjoyed considerable success and was soon earning $1, 250 a week.
In the late 1920's he and his brother Winter Davis Horton established a repertory company that presented George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward comedies, French farces, and Broadway hits to a loyal California following. As a producer and actor, he remained a mainstay of West Coast and regional theaters but never attained success on Broadway. At the Hollywood Playhouse in 1932, he first played Henry Dewlip, the aging, prissy bachelor roué, in Benn W. Levy's comedy Springtime for Henry, which had opened on Broadway in December 1931. Looking for a play to complete his company's season, he had persuaded Levy to let him mount a West Coast production of the hit. His characterization enjoyed great popular success, and Horton made the part his own, performing it nearly 3, 000 times in summer stock and touring companies. The role brought him national fame and considerable wealth.
Horton was one of the few actors with the talent to appear in both legitimate theater and movies. His first silent film was Vitagraph's Too Much Business (1922), in which he played the proprietor of a day nursery. At Paramount, James Cruze directed him in two roles that won him critical acclaim, an English butler transported to the West in Ruggles of Red Gap (1923) and a composer with a rich fantasy life in Beggar on Horseback (1925), but all in all, Horton enjoyed only modest success in silent comedies. Stage experience had given him speaking ability, and so, with the arrival of sound, he was in great demand.
Refusing to sign an exclusive contract, he made films for all the major studios as a free lance. His first all-sound feature-length film was Warner Brothers' The Terror (1928), in which he portrayed a drunken, half-crazy detective. He gave a finely crafted performance as the daydreaming, fussbudgety feature writer in Lewis Milestone's The Front Page (United Artists, 1931). More typical were his appearances in many of the sophisticated, glittering comedies of the 1930's. Ernst Lubitsch directed him in five such films: Trouble in Paradise (Paramount, 1932), Design for Living (Paramount, 1933), The Merry Widow (MGM, 1934), Angel (Paramount, 1937), and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (Paramount, 1938). He excelled in three Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance films, usually playing Astaire's best friend: The Gay Divorcee (RKO, 1934), in which he danced with Betty Grable in the showstopper "Let's K-nock K-nees"; Top Hat (RKO, 1935); and Shall We Dance (RKO, 1937).
Although stardom proved beyond his reach, Horton was a comic mainstay in more than one hundred films over a twenty-year period. With a flawless sense of timing, he employed deadpan seriousness, piercing stares, furtive looks, double or triple takes, raised eyebrows, mischievous grins, pursed lips, and panicky gestures in a manner ideal for light comedies or farces. He became well known for his portrayals of jittery, addle-brained fussbudgets. Horton never took his film work seriously but regarded it as a profitable sideline. Neither billing nor the size of his part concerned him, but his salary did. At the height of his career in the 1930's, he made nearly $5, 000 a week, which, added to his summer-stock and tour earnings, gave him an income equal to that of many stars. Horton's desire to live like a star necessitated a large income.
In 1925 he and his brother George had purchased twenty-two acres of land in California's San Fernando Valley. On the estate, which he called Belleigh Acres, he built an elaborate home of colonial design that grew in size as his film career prospered. Its seventeen rooms housed an extensive collection of antique furniture and books. The estate included dog kennels, a swimming pool, sunken tennis courts, and an extensive garden of rare shrubs and flowers. Here he entertained lavishly; his champagne breakfasts were famous among members of the film colony.
Horton's film career virtually ended in the late 1940's, and during the next twenty years, he played cameo roles in only six films, most of them undistinguished. He returned to his first love, the legitimate theater, touring in roles that had been created on Broadway by more famous actors; for example, in 1949 he played the lead in Noel Coward's Present Laughter, which Clifton Webb had originated on Broadway. He also toured widely in his summer-stock perennial, Springtime for Henry. In the early 1960's, when he was in his mid-seventies, he played the mute king to Imogene Coca's princess in an eighteen-month tour of Once upon a Mattress. In a national tour in 1963 of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, he took a bit part. In 1965 he played the Star-Keeper in a revival of Carousel at the New York State Theatre. It was clear that he wanted to die with his greasepaint on. He made numerous guest appearances on television situation comedies, and from 1965 to 1967 he played the medicine man Roaring Chicken on "'F' Troop. " He was in great demand for talk shows and did offscreen voices for cartoons and commercials. His final television appearance – as a crusty doctor in an episode of "The Governor and J. J. " – was broadcast after his death. He died at his home in the San Fernando Valley.
He had a long career in film, theater, radio, television, and voice work for animated cartoons. British Radio DJ and Comedian Kenny Everett adopted the name of Everett in honor of Horton who was a childhood hero of his. (Kenny's real name was Maurice Cole). For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Horton has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6427 Hollywood Boulevard.
Quotations: Horton accurately appraised his career when he confessed to an interviewer, "I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it. "
Although Horton never married, he enjoyed a close-knit family life on his estate. His two brothers and their families lived in guest-houses, and his mother and, later, his widowed sister lived with him.
