August 13 - Tony Jay

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

July 22 - Alan Menken

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On this day, in 1949, Alan Irwin Menken was born in New York, New York. The son of an actress and a piano playing dentist, Alan showed an aptitude for music at an early age. He learned to play the piano and the violin before moving right on into composing. By the age of nine, his original works were receiving Superior scores from the judges of the New York Federation of Music Clubs Junior Composers Contest. Alan graduated from New Rochelle High School in 1967 and moved on to New York University. He enrolled as a pre-med student, a nod to dear old dad, but graduated in 1971 with a degree in Musicology. From there, his plans went in one of two directions. He was either going to be a composer or a rock star. He got to have his cake and eat it too by becoming a rock star of composing.

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Shortly after his college graduation, Alan joined a musical theater workshop sponsored by Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). He continued to participate in BMI workshops over the next several years, writing songs for potential musicals and then performing them around town in clubs like The Ballroom and Tramps. To make money during this period, he wrote jingles, accompanied ballet troupes, wrote songs for Sesame Street and was a vocal coach. In 1979, Alan would earn some modest success when he teamed up with an up an coming playwright, Howard Ashman, to create a musical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The show got great reviews but not so great box office receipts. It didn’t matter. The two men worked well together and were destined for bigger things.

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In 1982, Alan and Howard’s next collaboration opened just off-Broadway at the WPA Theater. Based on a 1960 dark comedy film by Roger Corman, Little Shop of Horrors got rave reviews and soon moved to the Orpheum Theater where it ran for five years, smashing the box office record for an off-Broadway production. In 1986, a hit movie version was released starring Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene, and earned Alan and Howard their first Oscar nomination. The success of Little Shop brought the duo the attention of producers at the Walt Disney Studios who were looking for the right people to turn their next animated film into a musical.

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The mission that Disney Alan and Howard in 1987 was a simple one: after years of the company’s animation product being subpar, they needed to help create a Disney musical that could stand up to comparison with Snow White or Cinderella. No pressure though. I’ve read stories about the song writing duo holing up with nothing more than a synthesizer, in one of those buildings in New York where every floor is just dozens of tiny recording studios lined up in a row. Every time the door to their studio opened, the music that spilled out into the hall caused other doors to other studios to open as everyone wanted to know what was going on in there. And that was before a full orchestra and talents of Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll and Samuel E. Wright were added. Needless to say, Alan and Howard did good. The Little Mermaid became the company’s first smash hit in years, due in no small part to its soundtrack. When awards time came around, the boys would earn an Oscar for Best Song (Under the Sea) while Alan picked up a second one for Best Score. The Disney Renaissance had begun and Alan was going to provide a pretty big chunk of the music for it.

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Alan and Howard rolled right on into their next project, another classic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. You might have thought it would be hard for them to top their work in Mermaid, but they did. Their deft blending of romance and humor, spectacle and intimacy pushed Disney’s 30^th animated feature to a place cartoons had never been before: a nomination for the Best Picture Oscar. The boys also picked up not one but three nominations (and the win) for Best Song (Beauty and the Beast edged out Belle and Be Our Guest) while Alan again received the statue for Best Score. The ceremony would have been a magical evening of true celebration centering on Alan and Howard’s talents except for one thing. Howard wasn’t there to share in it.

During production on Mermaid, Howard had revealed to Alan that he’d been diagnosed as HIV+. As work progressed on Beast, so did Howard’s illness. Part way through production, meetings began to be held at Howard’s home and animators would be shocked as to how quickly AIDS was ravaging his body between sessions. Howard continued to work though, writing and rewriting songs and coaxing better performances out of Paige O’Hara and Robbie Benson, right up to the end of his life. Beast had its first screening for the press on March 10, 1991. Producer Don Hahn visited a barely alive Howard in the hospital to tell him about the incredibly enthusiastic reception. Four days later, he died.

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Work had already begun on the duo’s follow-up to Beast, Aladdin, when Howard passed away. Alan needed a new lyricist to work with (notes were his thing, not words) and he brought in the award winning Tim Rice to finish the songs for the film. Alan again picked up two Oscars that year, Best Song with Tim for A Whole New World and Best Score on his own. It should be noted that A Whole New World also won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year, the only time a Disney song has managed to do that.

Following Aladdin, Alan has collaborated with a number of lyricists, none of whom can hold a candle to Howard in my opinion but all successful none the less. He teamed with Jack Feldman for Newsies, Stephen Schwartz for Pocahontas (picking up two more Oscars), Stephen again for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, David Zippel for Hercules, which was a bit of a throwback to his Little Shop days (not only musically but because he and David had worked together back then, too), Glen Slater for Home on the Range and Tangled and Stephen once again for Enchanted. Alan has also scored some non musical films for Disney as well including Touchstone Pictures' Life With Mikey and the 2006 remake of The Shaggy Dog.

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In recent years, Alan has been quite busy revisiting old projects and adding new material to them. For the Broadway stage he's helped bolster Beauty and the Beast, Newsies, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. A stage version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame became the longest running show ever in Berlin, Germany. Alan has also been (for better or worse; don't get me started) part of the teams that have been turning classic Disney animated films into live action movies. He revised old songs and wrote new ones for the live versions of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

Outside of Disney (does that even exist anymore?), Alan has written music for a number of shows, several of which have had Broadway runs. His version of A Christmas Carol premiered in 1994 and became an annual event at Madison Square Garden for a decade. He's also written adaptations of Sister Act, A Bronx Tale and Leap of Faith. He is reportedly working on a stage version of Corrina, Corrina and had a reading of a new piece in collaboration with Jack Feldman and Harvey Fierstein called Greetings from Niagra Falls, but that production seems to have stalled.

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For basically writing everything everyone wants to put on their modern Disney playlist, Alan was declared an official Disney Legend in 2001. Not that he's done composing for the company by a long shot. He's currently working with Lin-Manuel Miranda on new music for the live action version of The Little Mermaid. And there's persistent rumors about a sequel to Enchanted (but don't hold your breath on that one). Alan is already at the top of the list of Living People with the Most Oscars with eight, but he's tied for third on the list of all time winners. I wouldn't be surprised if he pulls a couple more out of his little hat as time goes on here. Until then, we send good vibes Alan's way and wish him a happy 70th Birthday!

May 10 - Paige O'Hara

On this day, in 1956, Donna Paige Helmintoller was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She began taking acting classes at the ripe old age of four and performed in shows with the Fort Lauderdale Children's Theater throughout her childhood. Interestingly, it wasn't until she was almost twelve that she developed a need to add singing to her repertoire, choosing to go to Parkway Middle School of the Arts to further that goal. Paige also began drawing and painting at an early age. One of her first voice coaches, perhaps in an attempt to politely give their opinion of their new student, actually encouraged her to forget acting and take up painting. Luckily, Paige ignored that coach's advice and soldiered on as a performing artist. Not that she ever abandoned canvas and brushes, she just made visual arts her fallback position. She supported herself in the lean early years of her career by selling art pieces on the streets of New York.

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Paige's Broadway career (using the stage name Paige O'Hara, Helmintoller being a bit of a mouthful) began in 1983 in a revival of Jerome Kern’s classic musical, Showboat. She played Ellie May Chipley, a performer on the eponymous boat, under the watchful eye of Cap’n Andy, played in this production by the late, great Donald O’Connor. The revival lasted for 73 performances, but Paige’s relationship with Ellie continued on. She reprised the role for a 1989 production for Houston’s Grand Opera. At the same time, she was invited to sing Ellie for a 1988 studio cast album, which, for the first time, contained the show’s entire score and uncensored 1927 lyrics (the recording was nominated for a Grammy Award). After the Houston show closed, it travelled overseas to Cairo, Egypt and Paige went with it, becoming an international star in the process.

Shortly after returning the states, Paige read about a new animated film the Walt Disney Company was making based on the French fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. As a longtime fan of Disney movies, she decided to audition for it. Because of the success of The Little Mermaid and the full onslaught of the beginning of the Disney Renaissance, so did 500 other women. Paige credits her casting with the fact that lyricist Howard Ashman loved her in the recent Showboat recording. Beast co-director Kirk Wise says it was because she sounded a little like Judy Garland (whom they had loosely modeled Belle after) and would be able to make their heroine sound like a woman instead of a girl. Either way, Paige was chosen over everyone else (including Mermaid’s Jodi Benson, who was briefly considered) and began the role she would do almost continuously for the next two decades.

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With each passing year, Paige became more and more closely associated with the intelligent, quirky heroine who manages to tame a beast. She played Belle in several direct-to-video movies, including The Enchanted Christmas, which sold over 7.6 million copies when it was released. Add in at least five video games, all sorts of television shows, theme park attractions and parades and it’s no wonder Paige doesn’t mind the fact that so many fans only know her as the voice of Belle. In 2011, citing the fact that her voice had changed over the years more than the company would have liked, Disney replaced Paige as the woman behind the Beauty. They did soften the blow by declaring her an official Disney Legend at the same time, but it isn’t a pain free process to lose out on a role like Belle to someone twenty years your junior, no matter how talented they may be. The good news is that Paige doesn’t harbor any grudges. Not only has she joined the Disney Fine Art group, creating a series of paintings known as Belles by Belle, but she got to reprise the role itself for last year’s Ralph Breaks the Internet. There has also been exactly one time that you might have actually seen Paige in a Disney movie. She is one of three Disney Princesses (Mermaid’s Jodi Benson and Pocahontas’ Judy Kuhn are the other two) who make cameo’s in 2007’s Enchanted. Paige is the overly dramatic actress on a soap opera Prince Edward watches in his hotel room when he first gets to New York City.

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Outside of Disney and Showboat, Paige has made all sorts of appearances. She replaced Donna Murphy as Miss Alice Nutmeg in the 1985 Broadway production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and played Alice in the 1988 touring company. She played Ado Annie in a 1986 tour of Oklahoma!, did another stint on Broadway as Fantine in Les Miserables in 1995 and wowed audiences in Las Vegas in Menopause the Musical. She again went international as Nellie in an Australian production of South Pacific. In 2011, her career came full circle (so to speak) when she actually played Judy Garland in a biographical musical of the late legend in Tempe, Arizona. And she was reunited with Robby Benson, her Beast co-star, when she fell in love with him again during the second season of the animated series The Legend of Prince Valiant, which ran on the Family Channel in the early Nineties (prior to being owned by Disney).

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These days, Paige travels around the world making appearances that sometimes showcase her art (she was at the Epcot Festival of the Arts for several days recently), sometimes showcase her singing (she’s done concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl), and sometimes are just to meet her fans (she’ll be at GALAXYCON in Richmond, Virginia in a couple of weeks). No matter what she’s doing, we’re glad she developed all of her talents and look forward to seeing where she’ll pop up as our favorite braniac Princess next. Happy 63^rd birthday, Paige!

December 9 - Donny Osmond

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On this day, in 1957, Donald Clark Osmond was born in Ogden, Utah. As the seventh son (and no he wasn't the last one either) of George and Olive Osmond, Donny grew up in a close-knit Mormon family that produced a large number of performers.

Four of Donny's brothers, Alan, Jay, Merrill and Wayne, formed a singing group known as The Osmonds Brothers when they were kids (Alan was the oldest at 9). They were basically a barbershop quartet and sang to raise money to pay for the hearing aids two of their other brothers needed. As they gained popularity in Utah, their father decided to have them audition for the Lawrence Welk Show. When they got to California, Welk wasn't able to meet them so the family visited Disneyland as a consolation. When Tommy Walker, Disneyland's Director of Entertainment, stumbled upon the boys signing with the parks own barbershop quartet, the Dapper Dans, he hired them to appear on an episode of the television show Disneyland After Dark. When that episode aired in 1962, Andy Williams' dad was so impressed with their singing, he told his son to book them on his show. Andy did and The Osmond Brothers quickly became regular guests. A year later, five year old Donny joined the group and it became known simply as The Osmonds. The five brothers kept performing on The Andy Williams Show until it ended in 1967. At that point they signed with The Jerry Lewis Show for its two year run.

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Following the cancellation of The Jerry Lewis Show, The Osmonds decided they wanted to become a rock and roll band. With Merrill singing lead and Donny singing co-lead, the group had their first hit single with "One Bad Apple" in 1971 (the song had been written for the Jackson 5 who turned it down). A string of hits followed as the brother's popularity skyrocketed. Some songs followed the Merrill/Donny formula (Yo-Yo and Double Lovin') while Donny sang solo on others (Go Away Little Girl and Puppy Love). Minor tragedy struck in early 1972, when Donny hit puberty and his voice changed. It wasn't enough to keep the hits from coming though and the boys got their own Saturday morning cartoon that same year on ABC (it would only last the one season).

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During this same time period, Donny was starting to make it as a solo artist. He would still perform full time with The Osmonds, but was becoming increasingly popular on his own. He also began creating a string of hits with his only sister, Marie, who was climbing the country charts. By 1976, The Osmonds popularity had waned, which was okay with Donny as the next phase of career started that same year: a family produced television show called The Donny and Marie Show. The show ran for three seasons before being unexpectedly cancelled. The aftermath was terrible for the family. They incurred a lot of debt when they built a state of the art television studio in Utah, Donny suffered from performance anxiety, and Marie had wrestled with an eating disorder. Every member of the family would spend the next several years trying to recreate themselves and revive their careers.

Donny would continue performing and occasionally appeared in other musicians music videos. It wasn't until 1989 that he finally returned to the charts with the songs Soldier of Love and Sacred Emotion. As the Nineties progressed, Donny found success on the stage in the title role of a revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He performed the role over 2000 times, in spite of his anxiety and was chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber to star in the film version in 1999.

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Donny officially became part of the Disney family in 1998 (he hadn't become a member of The Osmonds until after their Disneyland After Dark performance) when he was chosen to be the singing voice of Captain Li Shang in Mulan. His rendition of I'll Make a Man Out of You has, in my opinion, become a Disney classic. Interestingly, Donny had auditioned to voice Hercules the year before but was deemed too old sounding. In 2006, he returned to the Broadway stage in a limited engagement as Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. He was so popular, his six week run was extended several weeks and he was invited back to close the show in July 2007.  He then was a part of the 2008 film College Road Trip which also starred Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symone. Donny's final appearance for Disney was as himself when he competed on the ninth season of Dancing with the Stars. He basically did it to try to show up his sister, Marie, who had competed on an earlier season. His strategy worked because he ended up being crowned champion.

Donny has had many other success in his varied career. He spent two seasons hosting a syndicated version of the game show Pyramid. He hosts his own syndicated radio show called, funnily enough, The Donny Osmond Show. And since 2008, he's appeared with his sister in a Las Vegas stage show at the Flamingo simply title "Donny and Marie." At 61, Donny not only keeps chugging along steadily, but continues to do it with the family that got him started in the first place. And that is something worth celebrating.

November 13 - Beauty and the Beast

On this day, in 1991, Walt Disney Picture's 30th animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, was released at the El Capitan Theatre. The movie had kind of had a premier a month and a half earlier at the New York Film Festival, it just wasn't finished yet. Even the roughly animated sequences were pretty impressive, though. Based on a French fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (try saying that five times fast), Beast is the third film of the Disney Renaissance and considered by some to be the pinnacle of modern Disney animation (I'm biased towards The Lion King for that title, but I do think Beast is a very close second).

When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs successfully proved that audiences were willing to sit through a feature length cartoon, Walt began looking around for other stories to animate. One of the ones that looked promising was the tale of Beauty and the Beast. The Disney writers wrestled with the story throughout the Thirties and even into the Fifties before deciding it was too difficult to adapt. To complicate matters, French director Jean Cocteau released a now classic version of the story in 1946. Plans for a Disney version ended up being shelved, where they gathered dust for decades.

In the late Eighties, after the making of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Disney had a new animation group in England that needed a new project to work on. Beauty and the Beast was dusted off and put into production as a non-musical. When Jeffrey Katzenberg, then chairman of the studio, saw an early storyboard treatment in 1989, the kindest thing he could say was throw it all away and let's start over. With the success of The Little Mermaid, Jeffrey declared that the new Beast would be a musical and put Alan Menken and Howard Ashman on the job. He wanted the directors of Mermaid, Ron Clements and John Musker, to lead the group again but they were too worn out to accept. Believe it or not, the studio then turned to two guys who had never directed a feature film before, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale. What Kirk and Gary had done was direct a little attraction for Epcot called Cranium Command.

Initially, the studio considered casting Jodi Benson, who helped make The Little Mermaid such a success, as Belle. They quickly decided, however, that this Disney heroine needed to sound more like a grown woman than a teenager and looked at over 500 actresses for the role. Howard Ashman, who was also an executive producer on the film, favored an actress featured on the cast recording of Show Boat and Broadway stalwart Paige O'Hara was given the part. To add some tragedy to the proceedings, Howard learned that he was dying from AIDS and so the pre-production hub moved from London to New York to accommodate his failing health. He would never get to see a finished film as he passed away eight months before Beast's release.

Most of the animation was done at the main studio in California although some was produced at the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, specifically the "Be Our Guest" scene. Beast is the second movie, after The Rescuers Down Under, that was done using the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), a digital process of scanning and inking drawings that allowed for greater depth and a more colorful finished product then the xerography technique the studio had used since the early Sixties. The music was mostly recorded with the actors singing at the same the orchestra played, instead of the usual practice of having the voice talent sing to a recording, thus giving Alan and Howard's songs a big boost of energy. And talk about voice talent. In addition to Paige, the cast includes Robby Benson, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, Jo Anne Worley, Tony Jay, Richard White and Disney Legend Angela Lansbury.

Upon its release, Beauty and the Beast was a massive success. It was the first animated film to gross 100 million dollars in North America and grossed over 350 million worldwide. Beast was universally acclaimed by critics and still boasts a rare A+ rating from audiences today. It became the first animated film to win the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. When Oscar time rolled around, Beast garnered six nominations: three for Best Song ("Beauty and the Beast" would win), Best Original Score (also a win), Best Sound and, another first for an animated movie, Best Picture. It would also win several Grammy Awards, including one for Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson's pop version of "Beauty and the Beast." Beast was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.

Since 1991, Beauty and the Beast has spawned all manner of offspring. A hit Broadway musical opened in 1994 and ran for 13 years. Some version of that show is still running somewhere in the world. There have been several direct-to-video sequels, the most successful of which was The Enchanted Christmas. Multiple shows have appeared over the years in Disney's theme parks, the Florida ones in particular, and there might have been a live action version released at some point. All of which just goes to prove that when you have a tale as old as time, and you give it the respect it deserves, fans will love it for all of time.

September 6 - Jo Anne Worley

On this day, in 1937, Jo Anne Worley was born in Lowell, Indiana.

Jo Anne grew up as the dreaded middle child of not three but five children. From the moment she could speak, the young Hoosier was aware that her voice might be a little bit louder than, well, everyone around her. She once joked that she would only lip synch in church so she wouldn't overpower the rest of the congregation.

Throughout high school, Jo Anne easily won the title of school comedienne every year. She also put in hours working as a waitress at the local truck stop, which may have fueled some of her comedy. After graduating in 1955, she began an apprenticeship with the Pickwick Players in Blauvelt, New York. Her voice was heard and, once the ringing in everyone's ears stopped, she'd won a scholarship to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Texas was only big enough to hold her for two years though. Jo Anne moved on to the similarly sunny pastures of southern California, continuing to study her craft at Los Angeles City College and performing at the Pasadena Playhouse. She got what looked like a big break as part of a musical revue, Billy Barnes People, that was headed to Broadway. It did actually make it, but only for six shows. In 1964, Jo Anne got what looked like another big break, again on Broadway, as the stand by performer for Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! Unfortunately, she was the stand by for Carol Channing, who would rather die before ever missing a performance. So Jo Anne did what many almost stars did before her, she created her own nightclub act and settled down in Greenwich Village. Of course, that's when she actually got a big break.

One night a guy by the name of Merv Griffin caught her act. He loved it and booked her on his television show. The audience loved Jo Anne so much, she would appear on the Merv Griffin Show 40 more times. All this exposure led to a role in a new off-Broadway production called The Mad Show. Believe it or not, it was a musical based on MAD Magazine and had Stephen Sondheim as one of its lyricists. Jo Anne happily sang for the cast recording and put in several hundred performances, but she would soon return to television for the defining project of her career.

In early 1968, two funny guys, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, put together a new sketch comedy show for NBC. The perks of being the show's creators included getting to name it after themselves: Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Jo Anne was a part of the mayhem known as Laugh-In from the beginning. For the next couple of years, she reveled in the non stop fun of the often politically controversial show. Jo Anne could often be seen cracking up in take after take, trying to get a joke out. By 1970, she yearned to do other projects and belted her last yodel for Dan and Dick.

Jo Anne has spent her time since then doing whatever her heart desires. She was a regular on game show like Hollywood Squares and every version of Pyramid ever made. She did guest spots on every television show that had celebrity guests from The Love Boat to Murder, She Wrote. She appeared in regional theater in shows like Gypsy, Anything Goes and, for real this time, Hello, Dolly! She also started doing voice over work.

For Disney, Jo Anne's biggest role has been as the voice of Madame Armoire the Wardrobe in Beauty and the Beast. I know, the wardrobe gets a much fancier name in the Broadway show, but that's all she gets for the movie. Jo Anne reprised the role in Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical World, Belle's Tales of Friendship and the Kingdom Hearts video games. She can also be heard in A Goofy Movie as Miss Maples. Fans of Kim Possible might recognize her voice as that of Bonnie Rockwaller's mother. She also did roles on The Wuzzles and DuckTales.

Jo Anne's voice isn't the only thing she's put to good use for Disney. The first role she ever had with the company was as Katrinka Muggelberg in 1976's The Shaggy D.A. Since then she's appeared in episodes of Wonderful World of Color, Boy Meets World, Wizards of Waverly Place and Jessie.

In recent years, Jo Anne has returned to her roots in the theater, playing Mrs. Tottendale in the Drowsy Chaperone and spending eight months as Madame Morrible in the LA version of Wicked. Currently, she spends her time as president of Actors and Others for Animals, an organization that works to spay and neuter the pets of southern California.