I started this series of posts about voices to highlight the power of the voice and how great actors can move us, inspire us, and amaze us, with a wonderful and unique voice.
In this fourth Voices post I want to highlight the voices of a few of the actors in the cast of The Hobbit. Whether it's the depth of the voice, or the vocal range, or the particular music of the accent, or even an idiosyncratic way of using words, to me the four men below have voices that command our attention and our emotions.
I've highlighted Richard Armitage's marvelous voice in a previous Voices post, but his deep masculine voice, and wonderful vocal range always amaze and inspire me. Luckily for us, thanks to BBC Radio, we have the privilege of hearing him reading poetry on occasion. Below he reads "Wife in London", a poem by Thomas Hardy:
I think that it has to be challenging for an actor to play a famous person, even someone from a time before film and video still kept the real person more of a mystery. Aidan Turner played the famous artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rosetti in the BBC series Desperate Romantics (2009). Turner's voice has a lovely musical quality, and in the video below he reads one of Rosetti's poems, The Kiss, as he portrays the artist himself:
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There are actors that are known for their unique voice, and their unique phrasing of words. For me Sir Ian McKellen is one of those special actors. In the video clip below a young Ian McKellen makes a very well known soliloquy from Shakespeare's Macbeth very much his own:
There are even some voices that frighten us, "tenebrosa" would be the word in Spanish, and I don't know an English equivalent. Voices that have a certain quality that reaches that certain part of our imagination frightened of the dark. The great Christopher Lee has that special quality in his voice, and we can become enchanted by it, and frightened as well. In the video below Christopher Lee reads from The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe:
To read and listen to my other Voices posts, click on the link below:
http://whiterosewritings.blogspot.com/search/label/Voices
