Is there a Brit alive who couldn’t instantly recognise BRIAN BLESSED’s voice?
Not the most distinctive, but David Duchovny’s voice is easily recognizable. He’s done a lot of dog food commercials and other dog/pet-related ads.
Jeff Bridges has done a bunch of car commercial voiceovers lately. I think they’re for Kia. [Nope, Hyundai.] I know Will Arnett from Arrested Development also did at least one car ad.
He was also the English voice of one of the Japanese in Tora! Tora! Tora! and often dubbed Toshiro Mifune’s lines, and was Dr. Voorhees in The Thing From Another World. He also voiced several animated commercial characters.
To me, his is ‘the most distinctive voice’ in movies.
And, he narrated Hardware Wars:
If I had to narrow it down to one male and one female:
Harvey Fierstein and Ethel Merman.
For some reason, there seem to be fewer women with truly distinctive voices, but I think Jane Fonda qualifies. As a matter of fact, today I had the very experience described in the OP. Heard her voice on television, and knew before looking up who I was going to see.
Yeah, he used to come into the petshop where I worked. Dressed you know in denim jacket, normal guy, with a kid. He’d ask about this fish or that plant, and my brain would be transported to the bottom of a well underneath a suburban house, where I was being ordered to put the lotion on my skin.
Currently, Andre 3000 is pretty impossible to miss.
Regis Philbin. Does he ever blow his nose?
Humphrey Bogart
John Malkovich and Nicolas Cage
Funny thing, on the female side it’s Nicole Kidman
Oooh! Carol Channing!
Perhaps not the most generically distinctive, but certainly the most haughtily distinctive:
Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride—Bette Davis
I think for the purposes of the OP, nobody can beat Jack Mercer . . . as Popeye.
Well, it’s been several years, but I worked in an Off-Broadway theater box office where he was doing a show, and I heard him buying tickets from a colleague one day. I didn’t have to look up to know who it was.
I dunno. A lot of people can do that voice. You might be looking up and see a different voice actor. Heck, even Dave Coulier’s impression from Full House has fooled me once.
Sam Elliott – Beef! It’s what’s for dinner!