Ever sat idly reading with the TV on and a character starts talking and you just know instantly who you’re going to see when you look up? Who for you had the most instantly recognisable voice in cinema?
Topic inspired because I was idly watching The Shootist the other day and I wasn’t watching the screen for a few minutes. Then all of a sudden a new voice pipped up and I knew instantly it was going to be Harry Morgan, best known for his role as Col Potter in MAS*H.
However, I think of the all time voices that it’s hard to beat James Mason with Cary Grant a close second. For the female stars, I was thinking Gloria Grahame but I have the feeling I’m missing actresses more obvious.
It may come from having spent the early years of my life listening to radio dramas, but voices have been as recognizable as faces most of my life. The thing that has always bothered me, and which I have toyed with starting a thread about, is how jarring it can be to see the face that goes with a voice after you have formed a mental image of what that voice’s face ought to look like.
As for “most distinctive” voice, I wouldn’t know where to start. Those already mentioned are good, but consider:
Gene Kelly
Lee J. Cobb
Alan Ladd
Carol Channing
Bill Cosby
Redd Foxx
Phyllis Diller
Richard Pryor
Johnny Carson
Tex Ritter
Burt Reynolds
Clint Eastwood
Jerry Lewis
Frank Sinatra
Walter Cronkite
Howard Cosell
This may be a little odd, but the first one that came to my mind is Wallace Shawn. Maybe it’s because he has so many great lines in The Princess Bride. When he did the voice of Bertram on Family Guy it was instantly recognizable.
I wonder if that’s his natural speaking voice, of if he exagerates the shrillness a bit when he’s acting.
An extremely distinctive voice for those of my generation, although I’ll bet most people couldn’t name it, or put a face to it, would be Paul Frees. He narrated lots of Disney work and was active in cartoons (where he was the voice of Ludwig von Drake and Boris Badenov, among others). He’s in mainstream films, too, and it’s his voice that asks which one of the defeated gladiators is Spartacus. He also provided vouices in science fiction films in the 1950s (including the alien voice in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, in which he had an extremely rare on-screen performance). He also did dubbing in cheapie foreign films, so if you’ve seen The Sword and the Dragon, Godzilla, or Rodan, you’ve heard his work.
Shohreh Aghdashloo, she could covered in layers of green latex to turn her into some kind of alien being and her distinctive voice would still be the first thing you notice.
