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5 Of Cinema’s Greatest Voiceover Narrators

Actors can cultivate their skills through years of training and learning their craft from all sorts of experts. They can take steps to improve their appearance, whether through natural, chemical or surgical means. But unless I’m missing something, the one part of a performer that it seems there’s no real way of attaining other than the happy accident of being born with it, is the quality of the voice. Certainly this is something that be augmented by how it’s used, and a case can most likely be made that the size of the voice doesn’t matter. But if Ted Williams, a.k.a. the homeless man with the golden voice, taught us anything, it’s that some people are just born with a gift for speaking in a way that tickles the eardrum just so.

[h2]3) Cate Blanchett[/h2]

Cate Blanchett

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When the first Lord of the Rings movie came out in 2001, it introduced itself in a tremendously captivating way, one that felt unlike any movie that came before, with a soft voiceover introduction leading into the title and score, then proceeding to explain the backstory of the trilogy.

But unlike more awkward uses of exposition to open a movie, this one feels like it delivers relatively little actual information and instead instills a distinct tone of the story to our ears while our eyes are being shown these delicious images that seem like they come from a completely different world than what we’re used to. The tone for the trilogy is largely set by Blanchett’s striking voice, both in the introductory voiceovers and later when she is portraying Galadriel and communicating mind messages to the characters and audience in a manner that is utterly haunting.

She’s done little other voiceover work to my knowledge, aside from narrating a recent documentary on the rise in prominence of women and girls on the international stage, as well as a TV series on the British monarchy. The quality of her voice and accent could really be put to greater use.

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