Great narrative speaking voices
Actors with great narrative and speaking voices
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Victor Jory was born in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. His burly physique made him a wrestling and boxing champion during his military service in the United States Coast Guard. After a few appearances on Broadway, he made his way into Hollywood in the early 1930s. His acting career spanned exactly 50 years, during which he played in nearly 200 films and TV series. In his early years he was cast in romantic roles, but it wasn't long before he began playing villainous parts, likely due to his "black eyes" which could easily give the impression of intimidation. He is remembered for his role as the ruthless overseer Jonas Wilkerson in Gone With the Wind, and his role as Lamont Cranston in The Shadow. He also played Oberon in the 1935 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Among these many co-starring roles, he also appeared in 7 Hopalong Cassidy films between the years 1941 and 1943, usually cast as the villain or a right hand man. The only Hopalong film in which he did not play a 'bad guy' was in Riders of the Timberlane where he played a hot blooded, broad-shouldered lumberjack. During his film career, Victor's voice also offered him the an extensive career in radio. He was the lead role in the radio series, Dangerously Yours, and he also narrated "Tubby the Tuba" and "Bumpo the Ballerina" for children. In the 1950s and 1960s, he began acting in television series while remaining in the film industry. He played the lead role of Detective Howard Finucane in the police drama series, Manhunt, which ran from 1959 to 1961. In 1962 he played Helen Keller's father in the film, The Miracle Worker, for which his co-stars Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft won Oscars. In 1964, he along with fellow actors Susan Seafourth and Coleen Gray testified before the United States Congress as part of Project Prayer, arguing in favor of an amendment which would restore school prayer, something which the United States had eliminated in the early 1960s. Victor Jory continued acting until he retired in 1980. He was married to Jean Inness Jory from 1928 until her death in 1978. Together they had two children, Jon and Jean. At age 79, Victor died of a heart attack on February 12, 1982, in Santa Monica, California.- Prolific, sharp-featured American character actor of somewhat skeletal and dishevelled appearance, accentuated later in his career by thinning hair and a scraggly goatee. A former theology student, Brocco began his career playing leading roles in stock theatre. He subsequently honed his craft touring France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, before returning to the U.S. in 1947, eventually joining the Federal Theater Group. On films from as early as 1932, he was at his most effective portraying eccentrics, scientists, small-time crooks, alcoholics, or nervous, downtrodden little men. His particular forte lay in the genre of science-fiction, where he graced the small screen on numerous occasions as assorted victims (The Outer Limits (1963), The Time Tunnel (1966), The Invaders (1967)) or aliens (Lost in Space (1965), Star Trek (1966), The Twilight Zone (1959)). His occasional film appearances include a dementia patent in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and a rare starring role in the black comedy Homebodies (1974), late in his career. As a liberal-minded individual, Brocco was briefly blacklisted during the McCarthy era, but this did not prove detrimental to his career in the long run.
- One of Hollywood's greatest screen villains, Charles Henry Pywell Daniell was born in London, England, the son of Elinor Mary (Wookey) and Henry Pyweh Daniell, L.R.C.P. He had the profound misfortune to make his professional theatrical debut on the eve of World War I. His life thus interrupted, he served in the trenches on the Western Front with the 2nd Battalion of the British Army's Norfolk Regiment. Wounded in action, he was invalided out of service in 1915 and spent much of the next few years on the West End stage without rising to particular prominence. In 1921, he made his way to the U.S. and worked hard to establish himself as a character player on Broadway, beginning with his role as Prince Charles de Vaucluse in "Claire de Lune". He enjoyed critical acclaim in only his third performance on the 'Great White Way', co-starring with Ethel Barrymore in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" (1924). For the remainder of the decade, Daniell alternated touring on both sides of the Atlantic, before making his first appearance on screen in 1929. Daniell's lean physique, sardonic, almost reptilian features, cold voice and incisive manner made him ideally cast as icy, austere aristocrats or as insidious, manipulating evil masterminds in period drama.
His most famous role was as the duplicitous Lord Wolfingham in The Sea Hawk (1940), though Daniell's inexperience as a swordsman compelled Warner Brothers to use a stuntman for the climactic fight scene with Errol Flynn. The previous year, Daniell had essayed the conspiratorial Sir Robert Cecil, spy master to Elizabeth I, with equal verve in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Under contract to MGM (1936-37), he also excelled as the erstwhile mentor of Greta Garbo's Camille (1936), the Baron de Varville. Their vitriolic exchanges are a highlight of the film and belie the fact that Daniell was fretfully nervous acting opposite Garbo. His other, invariably unsympathetic, portrayals include the scheming La Motte in Marie Antoinette (1938), the hypocritical clergyman Henry Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre (1943) and the gleefully villainous Regent in The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946). By the 1940's, Daniell popped up more and more in lower budget productions, yet managed to deliver two of his finest performances to date: the first, as Professor Moriarty, arch nemesis of Sherlock Holmes (played by his real-life friend Basil Rathbone) in The Woman in Green (1945); the second, as Dr. Wolfe MacFarlane, a 19th century Edinburgh surgeon employing the grave-robbing services of Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher (1945), a Faustian parable in which any semblance of morality and virtue is sacrificed to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. In the end, Gray (Karloff), the instrument of MacFarlane's machinations becomes "a canker in his body", but even his killing cannot assuage the surgeon's guilty conscience and he is eventually hounded to death by visions of the latter's corpse. This was a rare leading role for Daniell whose scenes with Karloff are among the most chilling of any in this genre. For a change of pace -- or, perhaps, to change his image -- Daniell did the occasional comedic turn, most notably in Charles Chaplin's Third Reich parody The Great Dictator (1940), as 'Garbitsch', a none too thinly disguised caricature of Joseph Goebbels.
On stage, he enjoyed his most successful run (344 performances) as the avaricious Henri Trochard in "My 3 Angels" at the Morosco Theatre in 1953. The play was filmed two years later as We're No Angels (1955), with, who else, but Basil Rathbone, in the part.
Daniell died after being stricken with a heart attack at his home, a few hours after filming a scene for his final film, My Fair Lady (1964). - Actor
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Michael Fox first "trod the boards" in grade school plays in his hometown of Yonkers, New York. After toying with the idea of becoming a history teacher, Fox did "something as foreign to my nature as one could think of", becoming a "boomer" (a migratory railroad worker) and taking jobs as a brakeman with various lines. His interest in acting was rekindled in the mid-'40s and he appeared in several "little theater" plays in Los Angeles. An acting-directing stint in a Players Ring production of "Home of the Brave" caught the eye of Harry Sauber, an associate of exploitation mogul "Jungle Sam" Sam Katzman, and Fox landed his first film role (A Yank in Indo-China (1952)). He appeared in dozens of movies (and innumerable TV episodes) in the decades since; one of his regular TV roles was as the coroner in the courtroom drama Perry Mason (1957).