Voice of Dramatic

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

In a World where producers want a particularly dramatic voice-over, there's only One Man they can call on...

OK, so there's actually a few other options, which they now don't have much choice in exercising.

Examples of Voice of Dramatic include:


  • Vincent Price
  • Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor in Doctor Who. He's done a few computer games, such as Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior. This is Played for Laughs in Little Britain, putting his full dramatic hamminess into lines like "Britain, Britain, Britain!... Land of technological achievement! We've had running water for over ten years, an underground tunnel that links us to Peru and we invented the cat!" and "I must go now as I promised my homies we'd chill for a bit, drink some pimp juice and, god willing, get us some sweet booty".
  • James Earl Jones
  • Michael Clarke Duncan
  • Kevin Conroy
  • Bill Mitchell's trademark gravel voice was heard on dozens of movie trailers and commercials. He was the voice of the Carlsberg ads ("Probably the best lager in the world") and did very convincing Orson Welles and Humphrey Bogart impressions. And the reason for his deep macho growl? A childhood bout of mumps had affected his vocal chords.
  • Terence Stamp
  • David Attenborough
  • Benjamin Völz (German voice actor who did the voice for Agent Fox Mulder on the German dub of The X-Files)
  • Franziska Pigulla (German voice actress who did the voice for Agent Dana Scully on the German dub of The X-Files. She is also often heard as a voice-over for various science documentaries in Germany, both German documentaries and dubbed BBC documentaries.)
    • And the male default voice for this kind of documentaries would be Rolf Schult, also known as one of the two dubbing voices of Captain Picard.
  • Orson Welles
  • Patrick Allen
  • Can't go without mentioning the late "In a World" guy, Don La Fontaine.
  • Christopher Lee and Ian Richardson- both the voices of Death who Talks like this.
  • Morgan Freeman
  • William Conrad
  • B.J. Ward
  • The late great Tony Jay
  • Keith David
  • John DiMaggio, who is more commonly known as Bender or Shnitzel, voices the likes of Gilgamesh and Aquaman.
  • James Sloyan, the Lexus spokesman from 1989 to 2009.
  • Also the late great Thurl Ravenscroft (although debatable here- despite his extremely deep voice, he seemed to work more at home with children's entertainment like with Dr. Seuss or Disney. Or Frosted Flakes. Still, that voice...).
  • Peter Cullen
  • Of particular note, is how if you're making a science or pseudoscience documentary, particularly about space, you want someone from Star Trek to do it. Patrick Stewart, Leonard Nimoy, Jonathan Frakes, Michael Dorn, and even William Shatner and more have lent their voice to such programs. The Simpsons parodied this process by having Nimoy host the X-Files crossover episode.
  • John Facenda and Harry Kalas, of NFL Films fame.
  • It's not just for men. You should hear Kate Mulgrew's car commercials.
  • Robert Lee.
  • In Mexico, José Lavat.
  • In Brazil, Cid Moreira (who even recorded The Bible). And for dubbing, Márcio Seixas.
  • W. Morgan Sheppard, him of the growly, growly, quasi-English-accented growly voice. Did I mention his voice is growly?
  • Ricardo Montalban
  • Charlton Heston, enough said...
  • Charlie O'Donnell, the longtime Wheel of Fortune announcer. The words "Twenty-five THOOOOOOOOOOOUSAND dollars!" will never sound the same again without him.
  • Similarly, Johnny Gilbert's sharp cry of "This... iiiiis... Jeopardy!"
  • "Come on down!", particularly when Johnny Olson said it.
  • Percy Rodrigues. He was the go-to guy in trailer voiceovers before Don LaFontaine came around (doing many horror movie trailers such as Jaws).
  • Paul Frees. He was a radio personality and a television actor. He's well known as the voice of the Ghost Host in the Disneyland and Walt Disney World ride The Haunted Mansion. He was also known for his spot-on vocal impersonation of Orson Welles.
  • Ernie Anderson, a longtime voiceover announcer for ABC, had a flair for this. See this intro to the 1979 network premiere of Jaws, for example.