Robert Easton

Robert Easton (born Robert Easton Burke; November 23, 1930 – December 16, 2011) was an American radio, film, and television actor whose career spanned more than 60 years. His mastery of English dialect earned him the epithet "The Man of a Thousand Voices". For decades, he was a leading Hollywood dialogue or accent coach. Early life Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1930, Robert was the only child of Mary Easton (née Kloes) and John Edward Burke. He moved to Texas at the age of seven with his mother, a former actress, following his parents' divorce. Resettling in the new cultural environment of San Antonio, young Robert took immediate notice of the style of speaking in the city, and he soon became interested in the variety of dialects spoken elsewhere in Texas and in the surrounding region. Struggling with a severe stuttering problem throughout his childhood also made Robert keenly aware of the "minutiae of speech" and the mechanics of pronunciation. Much later, in a 1998 interview with The New York Times, he explained, "When you have a big [stuttering] problem like that you compensate", adding "I found it easier to do voices other than my own." All of those early experiences of coping with his speech disorder and fine-tuning his ear to the peculiarities of regional accents and the subtleties of voice patterns proved to be, career-wise, great advantages for Robert. He not only became a successful character actor, he later gained a reputation in Hollywood as one of the more effective and highly respected dialect coaches in the entertainment industry. Radio Robert began performing on radio as a teenager. At the age of 14, he auditioned and was chosen to join the cast of the popular Chicago-based radio program "Quiz Kids". He toured the country in 1945 with the cast of other Quiz Kids "child prodigies", and those performances led to other opportunities on radio, such as his role as Magnus Proudfoot on the early radio version of Gunsmoke. He also performed on Fibber McGee and Molly, The Fred Allen Show, The Halls of Ivy, Our Miss Brooks, Suspense, William Shakespeare—A Portrait in Sound, The Zero Hour, and on an array of other radio programs. Easton's voice acting on radio continued for decades to come. As late as 2008, at the age of 77, he performed as the scheming character Bart Rathbone on Adventures in Odyssey, a radio drama series for children. Films By 1949, Easton began working in Hollywood films.