Robert Easton

Robert Easton, born Robert Easton Burke on November 23, 1930, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was an American actor and dialect coach whose career extended across more than six decades. He died on December 16, 2011. His exceptional command of accents and dialects earned him the nickname "The Man of a Thousand Voices," and he became one of Hollywood's most respected dialogue and accent coaches. His Broadway work includes an appearance in the 1927 musical Just Fancy.

Easton was the only child of Mary Easton and John Edward Burke. Following his parents' divorce, he relocated to San Antonio, Texas, at age seven with his mother, who had worked as an actress. The linguistic variety of his new surroundings sharpened his ear for regional speech, and a severe childhood stuttering problem deepened his awareness of pronunciation mechanics. In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, he attributed his facility with voices partly to that stutter, explaining that he found it easier to speak in voices other than his own.

His performing career began on radio while he was still a teenager. At fourteen, he was selected for the Chicago-based program Quiz Kids, and in 1945 he toured the country with its cast. Additional radio work followed, including the role of Magnus Proudfoot on an early version of Gunsmoke, as well as appearances on Fibber McGee and Molly, The Fred Allen Show, The Halls of Ivy, Our Miss Brooks, Suspense, and The Zero Hour, among others. His radio work continued well into later life; in 2008, at age seventy-seven, he voiced the character Bart Rathbone on the children's drama series Adventures in Odyssey.

After briefly attending the University of Texas, Easton entered Hollywood films in 1949, landing an uncredited bit part as a parking attendant in the Universal Pictures crime thriller Undertow. He continued performing under his birth name through his early screen work. His first credited film role, billed as Robert Easton Burke, came in the 1951 MGM production The Red Badge of Courage, directed by John Huston and starring Audie Murphy, in which he played a soldier. He subsequently changed his surname legally from Burke to Easton, primarily to distinguish himself from his father. Over the following decades he accumulated more than seventy-five film appearances, including the role of Sergeant Jonesie in the 1958 film When Hell Broke Loose, "Sparks" in the 1961 feature Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea alongside Peter Lorre, and "Handown" in the 1962 World War II film The War Lover, which starred Steve McQueen and Michael Crawford. Later credits included Cletis Ramey in the 1987 baseball film Long Gone, a Klingon judge in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991, John Janney in Gods and Generals in 2003, and Roger in Spiritual Warriors in 2007.

Easton's television career began on November 4, 1951, with an uncredited appearance on The Jack Benny Program. During the first season of Gunsmoke in 1955, he played Chester Goode's younger brother in an episode titled "Magnus." He appeared on several episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show in 1957 and 1958 as Brian McAfee, a slow-witted student at the University of Southern California. While living in England in the early 1960s, he performed on British television and radio, including a role in the second episode of The Saint in 1962 alongside Roger Moore, and provided the voices of "X-2-Zero" and "Phones" for Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Supermarionation series Stingray. After returning to the United States in late 1964, he resumed American television work, appearing on The Munsters, Combat!, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Get Smart, The Mod Squad, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and numerous other series.

By the early 1960s, Easton had grown dissatisfied with the recurring type of rural, slow-witted characters he was being cast to play, and he began systematically expanding his study of speech and accents. After marrying June Bettine Grimstead in March 1961, he moved with her to England, where he recorded the voices of farmers, cab drivers, shopkeepers, and hotel guests to analyze regional variations in English pronunciation. He also attended University College London to study phonetics. Over time he mastered more than two hundred ethnic, historical, regional, and sociological accents. By the late 1970s, his work as a dialect coach had surpassed acting as his primary occupation, and he went on to establish himself as one of the leading accent coaches in the entertainment industry.