Pat Fraley has played everyone from Huck Finn to Buzz Lightyear
Lon Chaney may have been the Man of a Thousand Faces, but Pat Fraley has him beat. Over the past thirty-five years, the prolific voiceover actor has portrayed more than 4,000 characters, including those on Saturday morning cartoons such as "DuckTales," "Ghostbusters," and "Smurfs." "One day you're hired to cry like a baby, the next day you're the president," says Fraley, MFA '73. "One of the wonderful things is that you're not typecast. It's all about what you can do with your voice."
'I now live in the house that Krang built.'Fraley has also worked on feature films, talking toys, and video games. For children of the Eighties, he is best known as the villain Krang from the cartoon "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." "Krang sounds like Katharine Hepburn and Ernest Borgnine meeting in an alley for acid indigestion," Fraley says. "We did 200 of those shows. I now live in the house that Krang built." He has recorded more than a dozen audio books, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for which he provided the voices of about a hundred characters in thirty-four dialects. Fraley has played Jesus in illustrated DVDs of the Bible, and he's Buzz Lightyear for Toy Story toys, commercials, and theme park rides, serving as a sound-alike for star Tim Allen. Outside the recording studio, Fraley teaches voiceover at the university level and has published several instructional books and CDs.
Fraley earned an MFA in acting from Cornell after majoring in dramatic art at Whitman College. He then joined a theatre company in Australia, where he discovered that he was better at manipulating his voice than at performing Shakespeare. Voiceover acting is challenging, Fraley says, because he must perform without visual cues and often receives prompt lines from actors thousands of miles away. The field is fast-paced; Fraley's agent sometimes sends him a script just hours before he is due at the recording studio. "I get a call when I'm in the car," Fraley says. "Whereas some people might be able to go to Kentucky and study the dialect, I'm lucky to have the time to swing by Kentucky Fried Chicken."
— Aeriel Emig '09