Classic film fans rejoiced across social media last night when Matt Berry unexpectedly invoked the name of Basil Rathbone during the Academy Awards broadcast. It made perfect sense: Berry’s ancient vampire Laszlo on What We Do in the Shadows is a connoisseur of all that’s cool across the centuries, and in Old Hollywood there was nobody cooler than Basil Rathbone.

Rathbone has some Oscar connections, too. In Hollywood’s greatest year, 1939, he was the first performer to take the stage at the Awards ceremony, at the time a low-key affair that followed a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Rathbone was at the height of his Hollywood career and fame that night, not to mention a second-time Best Supporting Actor nominee.

Over the previous four years, Basil had specialized as suave villains in period dramas, thrillers, literary adaptations and swashbucklers. Then he’d made a radical departure, playing the crafty and cheerfully amoral King Louis XI in If I Were King. Hunched over and tetchy, with an old man’s hair hanging down his shoulders, Rathbone was almost unrecognizable. And, with witty dialogue by Preston Sturges, unexpectedly funny. He was widely expected to win the Oscar, and his loss was considered an upset at the time.

Rathbone had previously been nominated for playing Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet—the first actor nominated for playing Shakespeare, followed eventually by Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. Rathbone arguably deserved to win for both his nominated performances, but he never did take home the gold (I explain the political realities behind the vote in my forthcoming Rathbone biography). The actor would have to wait another ten years for awards recognition, returning to Broadway as the cruel father in The Heiress and winning a Tony as best actor.

If Basil was disappointed at losing the Academy Award that evening in February 1939, he never mentioned it. He was Hollywood’s highest-paid freelance actor, with a big hit in release, Son of Frankenstein, gaining new fans for his protean performance in a classic horror film. Then a few weeks after the ceremony, Rathbone began shooting The Hound of the Baskervilles, playing a character new to him: Sherlock Holmes. Both roles, and both films, would bring him something every performer at last night’s Oscars might envy (even a vampire like Laszlo): immortality.