I’ve been listening to Old Time Radio and the most distinctive voice there was William Conrad. He was once of the busiest actors in radio in the 40s and 50s.
John Dehner also is easy to spot.
Sam Elliott could read me bedtime stories every night.
Good call.
Let us not forget John Facenda, the NFL’s “Voice of God”.
There is no frozen tundra of Lambeau Field without Facenda.
He reminds of a whole branch of distinctive voices that are meant to be annoying, or just are annoying anyway. Gilbert Gottfried and Bobcat Goldwaithe as examples. Mila Kunis would fit there with her most annoying voice, and maybe Fran Drescher the same way.
Kristen Schaal is another that’s very easy to pick out when she’s voicing an animated character, and could probably also fall into that “annoying” category.
And her “Bob’s Burgers” castmate H. Jon Benjamin (minus the “annoying” part).
“You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.”
I swear, I had something for this burger!
Mr T., Joe Pesci, Kristin Chenoweth, Matthew McConaughey
Emily Procter. I don’t know to what extent it’s characteristic of N Carolina or idiosyncratic to her in particular, but it’s very distinctive.
I heard Donald Sutherland do a voiceover for a commercial once and recognized it instantly. It was a not a celebrity endorsement, so they didn’t identify him.
George Burns, R.I.P.
Mike Rowe.
Men with powerful voices (forgive me, ladies) seem to have more authority with the things they say.
There was a while in, I don’t know, '90s, '00s, when half the commercials on TV has a voice over by Martin Sheen.
Will Arnett, Patrick Warburton.
Mike Rowe also jumped directly to my mind. He fits into my ‘smooth, baritone black guy’ type voice even though he isn’t a black guy. Avery Brooks, Keith David and Chuck Nice are three that have not already been mentioned yet in this thread.
Ronald Colman, Orson Welles, Erich von Stroheim, Joan Greenwood…so many others.
And of course, Harpo Marx.
And he is very entertaining as Gramp Rabbit in the children’s series, Pepper Pig.
In this episode he, ironically, loses his voice.
His peculiar wheezy voice was first thought likely to prevent him from moving to the talkies, but instead, it became his trademark. Devine claimed that his distinctive voice resulted from a childhood accident in which he fell while running with a curtain rod in his mouth at the Beale Hotel in Kingman, causing the rod to pierce the roof of his mouth. When he was able to speak again, he had a labored, scratchy, duo-tone voice. A biographer, however, indicated that this was one of several stories Devine fabricated about his voice. His son Tad related in an interview for Encore Westerns Channel (Jim Beaver, reporting from the 2007 Newport Beach Film Festival) that there indeed had been an accident, but he was uncertain if it resulted in his father’s unusual voice. When asked if he had strange nodes on his vocal cords, Devine replied, “I’ve got the same nodes as Bing Crosby, but his are in tune.”