It was more than just his voice that made this Batman feel immortal. Conroy knew what was in Batman’s heart. A gay man born into an Irish Catholic family, Conroy spent his adulthood living through the AIDS crisis, he told the New York Times in 2016 he went to “so many funerals” and worked overtime to keep his secret identity. The slow death of his alcoholic father, once found bleeding to death with a knife and empty bottle on his person, was as devastating to him as the gunshot that killed Bruce Wayne’s family.

It was the depth and dimensions of Conroy’s complicated life that gave him the textures to be Batman. In his transcendent performance, there was the weight of cold strategic analysis and red-hot vengeance, all of it palpable in his baritone voice and the solemn masculinity of his speech. Conroy’s Batman made you feel assured in bearing witness to the smartest, most prepared person in the room. He also made you afraid, as the last person you’d ever dare cross. 

He will be missed.