William West Anderson was born on Sept. 19, 1928, in Walla Walla, Washington. His parents divorced, and when his mother later remarried, she moved to Seattle with Adam and his younger brother, John.
West received degrees in literature and psychology from Whitman College. He took post-graduate courses at Stanford and did a two-year draft stint in the Army.
While attending Whitman College in 1950, he married Billie Lou Yeager, who was 17 at the time. West remained married to Billie through his Army tour, but divorced her in 1956 and married a Tahitian girl named Ngatokoruaimatauaia (Nga) Frisbie Dawson. Adam and Nga had a daughter, Jonelle, and a son, Hunter. They divorced in 1962. In the 1970s, he met and married Marcelle Tagand Lear, who already had two kids, Moya and Jill. Adam and Marcelle had two children of their own, Nina and Perrin. He is still married to Marcelle today.
After college, West worked as a DJ at a local radio station, then on military TV stations during his Army tour. After he was released from the Army, he toured Europe for a while with his wife, then moved to Hawaii, where he starred in a kids show with a friend from college, Carol Hebenstreit. In 1959, West moved to Hollywood and adopted his stage name, Adam West, which was well-suited as some of his first roles were in westerns. West is credited with over 60 movies and over 80 TV guest appearances, the most famous of which is his role as Batman in the ABC TV series that ran from 1966 to 1968.
West owned a stack of Batman comic books and had already been influenced by the caped crusader by the age of 10. For seven years, he played many roles in Hollywood before he was offered the starring role in Batman, which gave West international fame, but also typecast him to the point of his enduring years of unemployment after the TV series ended. For two full years, he was unable to get any work beyond personal appearances.