August 13 - Tony Jay

Image courtesy wikipedia.org

On this day, in 2006, Tony Jay passed away in Los Angeles, California. Born in London, England on February 2, 1933, Tony was always a little theatrical as a kid but he made a conscious choice to go into the real estate business because he believed it was far more financially stable. He did a stint with the Royal Air Force right out of high school, and upon his discharge in 1953, began building a realty company. He would occasionally appear in local amateur productions, but strictly as a hobby. In the mid Sixties, Tony moved his company to South Africa after hearing about the burgeoning market there. The opportunities he found there turned out to have nothing to do with buying and selling property. 

Within a couple of months after arriving on the southern tip of the African continent, Tony and his distinctive voice had been talked into making appearances in South African radio dramas. One of his longest running characters was a blind FBI agent he played on Sounds of Darkness from 1967-1972. The early success of that role convinced Tony to give up real estate and go into acting full time. He began writing and directing scripts as well as acting in them, producing several plays for Springbok Radio, a part of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Another role he became famous for was that of New York City cab driver Red Kowalski in Taxi!, which he played from 1969-1972 in South Africa and reprised for three more years starting in 1975, after returning to England. Tony’s final major project in South Africa was directing the first several months of a radio adaptation of a British television series, The Avengers. Part of his adaptation was to create a narrator part to help move the visual series into a world of only sound. The addition worked well enough that the radio show ran for over two years.

Image courtesy aveleyman.com

In 1973, Tony returned to his native land and began making appearances on television. He made the usual rounds of BBC mainstays of the time, doing episodes of The Professionals, BBC Shakespeare and played the role of Tsar Nicholas III in the miniseries Fall of Eagles, during which he began his friendship with Patrick Stewart who played Lenin. Tony’s career also expanded onto the stage and the silver screen during this period. He was part of the ensemble in Woody Allen’s Love and Death and had agreed to play a role in a space-opera being developed by George Lucas. Lucas ultimately went with Alec Guinness, though, and Tony missed being Obi Wan Kenobi by that much (he would, however, get to be the voice behind the commercials for Kenner Toys associated with Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, not the same but still fun). His stage credits from this period include Chekov’s The Three Sisters, Great Expectations and The Merchant of Venice. He ended his run in Britain as Victor Crummles in an eight and a half hour long Royal Shakespeare production of Nicholas Nickleby.

Image courtesy twinpeaksarchive.blogspot.com

Nicholas Nickleby was so well received, that a tour of America was put together for the rarely produced (at over eight hours in length is it any wonder why) show. Tony hinted to his friends that if he didn’t have to come back to England, he wouldn’t. He almost got his wish. His performance in Nickleby earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination during the limited time the show spent on Broadway and accolades in the New York Times. While he did have to return to Britain briefly after the tour ended, he was soon called back to the US for auditions and did indeed relocate permanently.

The project that Tony initially moved for, a pilot for a series called Circus, didn’t make it into actual production, but that didn’t slow his career down. He is perhaps most well known as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mentor, Professor Werner, in Twins but he began to gain traction elsewhere as well. He spent the Eighties and Nineties making guest appearances on television shows like The Golden Girls, Newhart, Murphy Brown and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He enjoyed recurring roles over the years as Paracelcus on CBS’s drama Beauty and the Beast, Dougie Milford on Twin Peaks, and Nigel St. John on Lois and Clark. His career virtually exploded when it came to doing voice work, however.

Image courtesy behindthevoiceactors.com

What began as an uncredited appearance on The Smurfs, became the bread and butter of Tony’s existence. His mellifluous voice began popping up in all kinds of productions. He was heard in everything from Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates to Evangelical Christian Radio’s Adventures in Odyssey. His recurring roles included Cynan and Baron Alric on The Legend of Prince Valiant, the Chief on 2 Stupid Dogs, Virgil and Norman’s Dad on Mighty Max, Golden Skull on Skeleton Warriors, Galactus and Terrax on Fantastic Four, Lord Dregg during the last two seasons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Chairface Chippendale on The Tick, Overlord on The Savage Dragon, Megabyte on ReBoot and, his final role, Spiderus on Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends, which earned him an Annie Award nomination. And none of that includes his one offs nor have we gotten to his Disney repertoire yet.

Image copyright Disney

Tony joined the Disney family in 1990 as the new voice of Shere Khan, at that point specifically for the animated series TaleSpin. He would go on to play the villainous tiger in a multitude of other projects, including The Jungle Book 2, episodes of House of Mouse (where he also voiced the Magic Mirror) and several video games. He then popped up on the big screen as Monsieur D’Arque, the creepy asylum owner, in Beauty and the Beast. Tony’s most famous role with Disney is undoubtedly Frollo, the villainous (noticing a pattern here?) judge, in 1996’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His last theatrically released role for the company was as the Narrator in Treasure Planet, but he also made dozens of smaller appearances in Disney television shows including episodes of Darkwing Duck, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Gargoyles, Recess, Timon and Pumbaa, Mickey Mouse Works, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Lloyd in Space, The Legend of Tarzan and 21 episodes as Wraith on The Mighty Ducks.

Tony continued working steadily right on into the 21^st Century, showing no signs of stopping until a tumor was discovered in a lung in April of 2006. Luckily, the biopsy revealed it to be non-cancerous. Unluckily, he suffered complications from its removal and became critically ill as a result of the surgery. The man with the internationally acclaimed golden voice would never recover again and died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that August. He was 73.