Meredith was known later in his career for his appearances on The Twilight Zone, portraying arch-villain The Penguin on the 1960s TV series Batman, and boxing trainer Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky film series. “Although those performances renewed his popularity,” observed Mel Gussow in The New York Times, “they represented only a small part of a richly varied career in which he played many of the more demanding roles in classical and contemporary theater—in plays by Shakespeare, O’Neill, Beckett and others. 
In 1929, he became a member of Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre company in New York City. Although best known to the larger world audience for his film and television work, Meredith was an influential actor and director for the stage. He made his Broadway debut as Peter in Le Gallienne’s production of Romeo and Juliet (1930) and became a star in Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset (1935), which became his film debut the following year. His early life and theatre work were the subject of a New Yorker profile. 
he won a Tony Award nomination for his 1974 Broadway staging of Ulysses in Nighttown, a theatrical adaptation of the “Nighttown” section of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Meredith also shared a Special Tony Award with James Thurber for their collaboration on A Thurber Carnival in 1960…
