Today, it is nearly a lost art. The few remaining impressionists rely on politicians as in SNL skits or sports figures (Frank Calliendo has made a career of doing John Madden). Some of the best comic performances on SNL were those of Dana Carvey (Bush 42), Daryl Hammond (Bill Clinton and Al Gore), Will Ferrell (Bush 43), Tina Fey (Sarah Palin). But there are few modern impressionists who do vocal caricatures of contemporary actors.
The fact is that, with the notable exception of Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, contemporary actors don’t have distinctive memorable voices. Can anyone get a laugh imitating the the voice of Meryl Streep or Nicole Kidman or Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston? Is there anything about their voices that captures their personas?
Despite the popularity of the horror genre, has any actor in any horror flick of the past thirty years been more memorable than the old timers, Bela Lugosi ("Dracula") or Boris Karloff ("The Mummy")? As funny as Robin Williams can be, is his voice as distinctive or funnier than Groucho’s or Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy? Angelina Jolie has a sexy face and figure, but can you identify her voice as easily as you could Marilyn Monroe’s, whose breathy tones say it all in a rapid heartbeat.
Think about the voice of James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Katherine Hepburn or Henry Fonda. Some of today’s movie stars have the charisma to stop traffic, but once they speak, who cares?
In the early days when movies began to talk and voice recording technology was primitive, many silent film stars flopped because they had voices that scared the moguls. Some were "too foreign," other voices didn’t match faces.
John Gilbert, a romantic lead in silents, had a decent speaking voice face to face, but rumors spread that in sound tests his voice was laughably high pitched. He panicked, adopted a stilted, overly trained diction that led to ridicule, fatal for a screen lover and his career swooned. In a few years he became an unemployed alcoholic and died.
Others were luckier. Gary Cooper made the transition by emphasizing his Wyoming bred western twang (though he was educated partly in England). MGM was so terrified that Greta Garbo’s thick Swedish accent would doom their meal ticket that they delayed her first talkie for years. After crash diction classes made her sound legible, they put her in Eugene O’Neill’s "Anna Christie," about a prostitute who returns home to her Swedish father, which made her accent appropriate.
Her opening line: "Giff me a viskey, ginger ale on da side, and don’ be stingy, baby," became an instant classic. Breathing relieved sighs, Louis B. Meyer and Irving Thalberg trumpeted their marketing: "Garbo talks." Garbo’s most famous contralto tag line, "I vant to be alone" was part of all stock imitations of the iconoclastic star.
Later, Marlene Dietrich’s success solidified the notion that deep voices and foreign accents could add to the sex appeal of female stars.
The best voice of the era was Ronald Colman’s. He had been an established silent star but with talkies, his mellow English voice was almost poetic. In period epics derived from literature, he spoke the classic lines as audiences heard them in their minds. "A Tale Of Two Cities" ("Its a far, far better thing I do..."), "The Prisoner Of Zenda", "Lost Horizon".
In 1942, George Stevens directed Colman, along with Jean Arthur, Cary Grant, and character actor Edgar Buchanan, a cast that may have had the most interesting voices of the decade in a comedy / drama, "Talk Of The Town".
Talking pictures compelled studio heads to scour the stage for actors who could speak and their ears perked up when they heard voices that could project to the balconies and were impervious to tinny sound systems.
In 1929, James Cagney was signed directly from a Broadway play called "Penny Arcade". Seven pictures and two years later, he shot to stardom when he really found "his voice" as "The Public Enemy," spitting his dialogue into the faces of his enemies as if they were bullets, creating an entirely new style of street-wise acting, that influenced all later tough guys, including De Niro.
Warners found most of their gangsters on the stage: Muni, Robinson, Bogart. Spencer Tracy made a hit on Broadway in "The Last Mile" and was signed by John Ford to play another convict (with Bogart) in "Up The River" in 1930.
These great stars were lucky for the timely advent of talkies. None of them had faces that would have made them leads in silents; their voices were their fortune.
Of course, the most famous stage actor of his day was John Barrymore. Considered the best American classical actor of the early 20th century stage, "the Great Profile" found steady work, then stardom as a silent movie star, playing "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" among many other roles.
In 1926, Warner Brothers released the experimental "Don Juan" starring Barrymore. The film included the first fully synchronized sound track. When talkies began (the next year, 1927, "The Jazz Singer" came out), Barrymore continued to thrive.
His performance in the Hecht / MacArthur / Hawks production of "Twentieth Century" is one of the first and best of the screwball genre co-starring Carole Lombard, who exhibited her brilliant comic manner in such dialogue as in "My Man Godfrey," in which she created the persona of a charming, sexy, ditzy but somehow wise woman.
Another important reason for the dominance of voices was that the other mass medium of the era was radio.
By the 1930's, radio had trained audiences to listen — writers who came from the medium were all about the dialogue, and their words told the story as much or even more than the images. They craved actors who could punch the lines, bring them to life. Actors with characteristic voices were listened to and writers loved to write for them.
That is why Capra’s favorite collaborating writer, Robert Riskin, and the writer / director of great comedies of the 1940's, Preston Sturges, treasured actors like Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Fonda, Joel McCrea, Cooper, and Stewart.
They also filled out their films with supporting players who had terrific voices: the gravel voiced Lionel Stander ("Mr. Deeds Goes To Town"), Charles Coburn "The Lady Eve"), Roscoe Karns ("It Happened One Night)", Walter Connolly ("Mr. Deeds..."), Eugene Pollard ("Mr. Smith Goes To Washington"), James Gleason ("Arsenic And Old Lace"). You may never remember their names, but their voices can’t be forgotten.
Now, who was that actor who played Ryan Reynolds’ friend in that romcom with what’s-her-name?
