Really precious voices

There are a few actors out there who you will never forget when you have heard them once. Who have a certain quality which you will not find once in a thousand. This is not the same as just being a good actor. There are fabulous actors who do immortal performances with perfectly unremarkable voices. Mark Rylance as Shakespeare’s Richard II for example, or Christoph Waltz in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

But then there are a couple of people who just sound special, whether it be a theatrical monologue, an interview or a song.

I now want to give you a few examples of people I put in this category.

Christopher Lee!

In a career spanning from 1948 to the present day he has starred in hundreds of roles, including Dracula, a James Bond villain, a lightsaber wielding count in Star Wars, the founder of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Tolkien’s wizard Saruman. He has sung with metal bands and done voicework for animated movies. He was knighted by the Queen of England in 2009. And above all he has a voice you will never forget.

The first example I would like to show you is a clip from an otherwise unremarkable movie called The Return of Captain Invincible, a superhero satire (which I haven’t actually seen yet, except for the mentioned clip, but I am searching for it.) Here it is! It shows Lee as the film’s villain singing a song about alcohol torturing the formerly alcoholic superhero, and he pulls all the vocal stops here.

The other one is from the animated movie The Last Unicorn. It is a weird movie, deadly serious, melodramatic bordering to being ridiculous, but still in some way strangely touching. And it has a famous title song (which you surely have heard, even if you don’t know the movie).

Christopher Lee voiced the movie’s villain, King Haggard (as so often: villains for Mr. Lee) and he did a fantastic job. See this clip! An interesting thing is the fact that Lee also voiced the part in the German version of the movie. The traces of accent he had only served to make his performance still more outlandish.

Unfortunately most of the other people I could mention as examples are either Austrian or German, and so are the clips I can show you. You can of course listen to them, but I am sorry that your enjoyment probably won’t be anywhere near mine. Still I enjoy listening to Shakespeare performances despite the fact that I don’t understand too much of it (without listening to the same passages 10 times over, anyway, or reading the text beforehand).

The first is the late theatrical actor Oskar Werner. For people outside Vienna he is best known (maybe only known) for playing the lead role in Truffaut’s 1966 movie adaption of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

There seems to have been a bunch of trouble concerning languages when the movie was shot. It was shot in English, which the director did not speak, and the language on the set was French. I have watched some bits of it in the English version and I am not at all sure whether it is Werner’s voice at all. It does sound similar, but it does have nothing of the particular ring which made him so special. Either he was dubbed (I don’t know by who) or it is indeed Werner, but speaking a foreign language coupled with indifference (there was a lot of friction on the set between Werner and Truffaut) changed his voice to be hardly recognizable.

All in all this leaves a movie that is, to be frank, not very good. It does not do justice to the novel (and I heard, Bradbury hated it for that): Bradbury’s world is an intensified version of modern urban life, where people drown themselves in fast driving, television and triteness. The movie is set in a landscape of small cottages in endless woods with empty roads and all kinds of quaint old-fashionedness.

But Oskar Werner personally dubbed his part for the German version of the movie, with his usual quality, and this saves it. It therefore is one of the very rare examples where a translated version of a movie can be said to be better than the original.

If you want to hear Werner at his best, try this recording of Schiller’s poem Die Bürgschaft (The Hostage). It is, as I have announced, in German. It is one of the most famous German poems and in former times millions of school children had to memorize it as an exercise.

The other one is the famous German theatrical actor Klaus Kinski. He was known for his weird, dark, flamboyant personality, and his fondness for playing such roles. I hesitated whether I should name him at all as I feel his way of speaking was more of an aquired habit or a shtick than a unique talent. Still it is definitely memorable. [Addendum: This seems to be true, I just listened to an interview with him and there he sounded completely normal, except for what he said, which was utterly crazy.]

The example I would like to give you is the German original of Goethe’s poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which was famously used as the basis of Paul Dukas orchestral piece of the same name, which in turn was used as the score to the cartoon version of the poem in Disney’s Fantasia.

I have listened to Kinski reciting Die Bürgschaft as well and was not impressed. His voice, always sounding like a man close to insanity is so much more suited to the sorcerer’s apprentice than to the heroically faithful Greek of Schiller.

I noticed that my examples do not contain any women and wondered why. I have to admit I don’t know. Hollywood tends to chose their famous actresses mainly for their looks (which makes me really angry sometimes), but then again the men I mentioned aren’t Brad Pitt or George Clooney either. There sure are some unique and talented women around (like Tilda Swinton), but I haven’t found one yet with a really unique voice.

I considered mentioning Björk, but her voice sounds only fascinating when she is singing. That’s alright as she is a singer, but if I start listing singers who sound interesting I won’t ever be able to finish.

So I will end this article with an invitation. If you know a person, actor or actress who you think deserves to be included in this list, drop me a line! I would love to expand my knowledge and my list and my article.