They’re both played by Paul Frees.
Mind you, that applies to an awful lot of characters on radio, TV and films. Frees even played himself; a radio station hired him for a late-night show for a little while in the early ‘50s.
In 1949, Frees landed starring parts on two shows—the aforementioned Crime Correspondent and then the title role in The Green Lama.
Frees was already catching the attention of columnists in the late ‘40s. This appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on May 29, 1949.
Here's a young actor who recently won two important radio awards in one week—one of which named him as the "outstanding supporting player of the year"—and still scarcely anyone, outside the business, knows who he is.Cartoon fans know Frees from all kinds of places. In the theatrical world, he was hired by MGM, Walter Lantz and Walt Disney. On television, Jay Ward, Hanna-Barbera, UPA and Rankin/Bass found animated characters for his voices. Oh, and Format Films. Oh, and those Beatles cartoons. Oh, and... well, it’s probably easier listing where he didn’t work than where he did. This isn’t including animated commercials.
Did you ever hear of Paul Frees? Remember the deep, ominous voice of the narrator on "Suspense"—the guy who gives you the shivers as he introduces ". . . a tale well calculated to keep you in—Suspense!" That's Paul Frees.
Remember the hilarious Peter Lorre impersonation on Spike Jones recording of "My Old Flame." That's Paul Frees, too.
Frees is, in a sense, a victim of his own versatility—for he has so many voices that he has no single identity. Described by Spike Jones as "one of the greatest impersonators in the world," he has simulated the voices of virtually every celebrity you can think of, from the late Franklin Roosevelt to Sidney Greenstreet. He does every dialect known to human speech, and often takes several roles in a single production."
"It's fun," says Paul, "but I'd rather be a star."
If radio performers ever start electing their own stars, you can bet that Paul Frees' name will be high on the marquee—a thought which should be some consolation.
Let’s not bother with lists and move on to an unbylined article that appeared in a bunch of newspapers in 1961; I spotted this in papers published in August through November.
Paul Frees has never been able to follow the parental dictum that he be seen and not heard.Frees had some great cartoon roles (Boris Badenov, Ludwig von Drake) and some mediocre ones (Charlie Beary, Squiddly Diddly) but he always gave a top performance and that’s why fans still love his work, even today.
In fact, Paul is the talkingest man you're likely to meet and he's seldom seen at all.
One of the group of performers known as "voice men," he's virtually unknown outside casting offices and advertising agencies, yet there's hardly an adult in the United States that hasn't heard his voice.
Paul figures he's played in 15,000 radio shows, more commercials than he can count and currently, he's the voice of Professor Ludwig Von Drake on "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" and of Boris on "The Bullwinkle Show," both on NBC-TV. Of all the roles he's played, he likes Professor Von Drake best.
"Walt Disney gave me a lot of liberty in portraying the professor and I've made him more personal than any of my other characters," Paul says, resisting a temptation to slip into the German dialect he uses on the show.
"The professor is bright, good natured, has a sense of humor and is marvelously absent-minded at times," Paul adds. "But he has character. He's always driving at something and he's not beyond scolding you for lack of attention."
A German dialect like the professor's is just one of the things Paul carries in his bag of voice tricks.
"I can duplicate any voice and any dialect I hear," he says, confidently. Besides, he says he can deliver three or four versions of each of the common dialects and, in one feature picture, "A Time to Live and Time to Die," he took the speaking parts of 17 different German characters.
So good is he at voice duplication that he did the voice "stand in" work for stars like Orson Welles and Humphrey Bogart and once, he says, did a half hour radio show for Bogart when the actor couldn't make it.
Radio listeners will remember him as the voice of the old "Suspense" and "Escape" shows and TV viewers have heard him as the voice on “The Millionaire” series, among other shows.
Paul began training for his unusual profession when he went into vaudeville at the age of 13. Along the way, he's been a singer, dancer, nightclub emcee and impersonator. His impersonations paved the way for his present voice work.
Last year he won nine awards at the Commercial Film Festival. Those, he added to more than 100 others he's won over the years.
Paul has literally talked himself to success and, although he's a competent TV actor, he's happy right now to go on being heard and not seen.
"Sometimes it creates an ego problem," he admits, "but nothing so serious I can't overcome it when I look at the bank balance."
Warner Bros. even used him on very rare (due to his higher union fees) on projects like 1964's "THE INCREDIBLE MR.LIMPET", where he was Crusty, the often easily hot and bothered hermit crab, who was a buddy to Mr.,Limpet, along with a REAL rarely heard Sputhern bele voice, Elizabeth MacRae ["Ladyfish", the love interest], and a Gaines Dog Food ad. High union scales=a fishy role being rare..(that's a joke,m son )(MacRae would appear regularly on Gomer Pyle..]
ReplyDeleteI mean, Southern Belle..
ReplyDeleteFrees also gave a top notch dub performance in the Toho Kaiju rally King Kong Escapes (1967) where he chews up every bit of delicious screentime.
ReplyDeleteThe first time i remember seeing his name connected with a character was as John Beresford Tipton on The Millionaire (loved that show!).
ReplyDeletefrom then i looked for him in other places.
even more versatile than Don Messick and Daws Butler combined.
Not sure what Pokey means by "higher union fees." Warner Bros. was and is a union signatory so every actor who works for them receives the fee that the union negotiates as a minimum. If Frees received an above-scale fee -- and we don't know that he did -- that would have been negotiated by his agent, not the union. Unions like that just set minimums.
ReplyDeleteThanks for clearing that up, Mark. Your expertise is always welcome here.
DeleteThanks, it sure is welcome.:-)
DeleteHty, Mark,Steve C here. I was just guessing, knowing that he'd done that later, THE HAUNTED MANSION replacement of him in their 1969 LP soundtrack being a reason..btw wouldn't today be his birthday (100?).
ReplyDeleteOne of my all-time favorite Paul Frees moments was when I heard his voice coming out of Toshiro Mifune's mouth in "Grand Prix."
ReplyDeleteFrees' animation work mainly was on cartoons storyboarded and/or animated on the West Coast, but King Features did hire him as the main male voice on both their Snuffy Smith and Krazy Kat efforts in 1963-64, that were either done by Paramount in New York or by Gene Deitch's studio in Prague.
ReplyDelete