His mother, Frances or Fanny, née Prešeren, came to the United States as a young girl from Regrča Vas, near Novo Mesto, the main city of Lower Carniola, in Slovenia.

He was still in high school when he obtained his first paid employment, which he secured as the prize in a Pittsburgh talent contest in 1951: a one-week engagement at Jackie Heller's New York nightclub, Carousel.

In 1961, Gorshin gave a tour de force performance as an impressionist who kills his fiancée under the influence of one of his celebrity characters in The Defenders.

He was also popular for simulating bodily and facial resemblances, and pitch-perfect imitations of voice, accent, and vocal inflections and mannerisms.

Gorshin's slender athletic build, wide mouth, and pale eyes under strong brows were ideal characteristics for screen henchmen.

He sustained a fractured skull and spent four days in a coma; a Los Angeles newspaper incorrectly reported he had been killed.

He did take a comic turn, though, as the hipster jazz bassist Basil (paired with singer Connie Francis) in Where the Boys Are (1960), as a bumbling kidnapper in the Hayley Mills vehicle That Darn Cat!

In 1962, Gorshin was cast as Billy Roy Fix in the episode "The Fire Dancer" of the NBC modern Western television series Empire, starring Richard Egan as the rancher Jim Redigo.

From 1966 to 1968, Gorshin played the Riddler on ABC's 1960s live-action television series Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, and was nominated for an Emmy Award (Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Comedy).

Gorshin's portrayal of the character included a high-pitched, deranged cackle, inspired by that of Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death (1947).

Gorshin also had a memorable role in the 1969 Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" as the bigoted half-whiteface, half-blackface alien Bele from the planet Cheron.

He made numerous guest-starring appearances on such television series as The Name of the Game (1969) Ironside (1974), Hawaii Five-O (1974), Get Christie Love!

In 1979, he played interplanetary assassin Seton Kellogg in a two-part episode of the television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century titled "Plot to Kill a City".

[11] He also appeared as the villainous Dan Wesker in the miniseries Goliath Awaits (1981); and played the role of Smiley Wilson on the ABC soap opera The Edge of Night (1981–82), where he used his impersonation talents to mimic other performers on the series.

During the 1990s, he featured as a mobster kingpin in The Meteor Man (1993), played the evil sorcerer Brother Septimus in "The Tale of the Carved Stone" episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?

In his final years, Gorshin portrayed the famous comedian George Burns on Broadway in the one-man show Say Goodnight, Gracie (2002), which was nominated for a 2003 Tony Award for best play[12][13] and was reunited with several of his Batman colleagues in the television film Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt, in which he appeared as himself.

An ambulance met the plane upon landing and Gorshin was transported to a Burbank hospital, where he died three weeks later, on May 17, 2005, aged 72 from lung cancer, complicated by emphysema and pneumonia.