I’m watching Goodfellas for the umpteenth time. Early in the film there is a scene in a salon. The women all doing what women do. There is this amazingly beautiful woman in a chair. Her hair is up. She looks like a trigger supermodel.
Then she speaks.
OMG…its LLorraine fucking Bracco. Beautiful but with a voice that is fingernails against the chalkboard.
Can we think of any other examples?
Here’s another Lorraine in action.
I think she’s a fine actress and a beautiful woman, but I’m not all that fond of Scarlet Johansson’s nasal voice.
Tom Selleck has a pretty whiny voice for someone who used to be the gold standard for macho.
My sweet baby Johnny Depp seems unable to enunciate when he’s not in character.
Yeah SJ was the first person I thought of when I saw the thread title. But really, any actress with what could be described as a “husky” voice, which seems to have been the preferred style for actresses back in the mid-20th century (or maybe it was because they each smoked approximately 37 cartons of cigarettes a day.)
Fran Drescher made her career on her face, figure and, er, odd voice.
Miley Cyrus’s speaking voice sounds like an 80 year old smoker. It works when she is singing, but not when talking.
I noticed this a bit on Two And A Half Men, many of the lovely one-episode-only women had beautiful Californian little girl accents; some though sounded like they were raised by crows.
Funny thing about her. When she was first starting out, she got vocal training to get rid of the nasal quality to her voice, and develop a more neutral accent.
But it didn’t help her career the way she thought it would, so she went back to how she naturally spoke and, as you say, made a career on it.
Not a famous person, but one of the pretty young summer interns, who just left the law firm, had the voice of too much vodka and alcohol.
Jennifer Richards is typically associated with being a modern-day Marilyn Monroe but can talk like a trucker.
Makes you wonder which voice is real.
I’ve met her a few times and her voice is somewhere in between. She’s definitely a bit nasally but her accent is much more subtle and her voice not as high pitched. Very nice woman.
Maybe it’s because he’s surrounded by all those well-spoken Shakespearean actors in the LOTR movies, but Viggo Mortenson’s voice often sounded like he was first cousin to Donald Duck, at least to me. I irritate my husband by calling him “Quacker” when he comes onscreen.
I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention Jennifer Lopez.
John Travolta, in the movie Grease - I don’t know if his voice is generally better, but the last note of “Summer Nights” makes me want to claw my ears out, and I’m pretty darned sure the reason is him and not Olivia Newton-John.
Tress MacNeille, who does the voices of Mom on Futurama and Agnes Skinner on The Simpsons. A brief clip of her in action.
To be fair, she was also Dot on Animaniacs, so she can turn it on and off.
If we’re categorizing Tress MacNeille as “beautiful” then I may as well add Shohreh Aghdashloo, from The Expanse. Her voice is so deep and grating to me that it almost took me out of the series. Here’s her in action.
And Babs Bunny ! Never forget Babs Bunny !
First person who says, “Kristen Schaal” gets punched in the nose!
