Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today admitting to my fondness for movie musicals—everything from Singin’ in the Rain to Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. Not too long ago, in the course of about a month, I ended up watching three different versions of Gypsy, one starring Rosalind Russell, one with Bette Midler, and the third, to my surprise, starring British actress Imelda Staunton (perhaps best know for her role as Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies).

But here’s the really odd thing: when an earworm inevitably surfaced—”Everything’s Coming up Roses”—it wasn’t any of those actresses I heard singing in my head. It was Ethel Merman, who originated the role on Broadway. That got me thinking about voices.

This post isn’t about voices done by A.I. or impressionists, or even about voices familiar to us because they belong to family or friends or because we hear them all the time on radio, tv, or a podcast. My focus is on truly distinctive voices, the ones you recognize even years after the last time you heard them.

These are rare. Lots of famous actors have versatile voices, but are they recognizable instantly? When I started thinking about it, I could come up with quite a few names, but that was a small number compared to how many actors are out there. Sometimes I hear a voice-over and instantly know who it is—Helen Mirren in Barbie comes to mind. But for the most part when I hear a voice that sounds vaguely familiar I can’t identify it. It’s distinctive, but not distinctive enough.

Somewhere along the path of my musings, it occurred to me that most of the voices I immediately recognized weren’t just speaking. They were singing, which brings me back to Ethel Merman (her name is a link to hear her singing one of the songs from Gypsy). The best film to hear her in is There’s No Business Like Show Business. Another Broadway actress with a distinctive voice was Gwen Verdon. I was lucky enough to see her live in Sweet Charity and her name is a link to one of the songs from that show, but you can hear her speaking voice in the films Damn Yankees and Cocoon.

Who else came to mind? Jimmy Durante voicing a song at the end of Sleepless in Seattle. You may have noticed that most of my examples of distinctive voices are, shall we say, old. Well, so am I!

One of the most frequent suggestions given to writers is to listen to how various people speak and try to approximate that on the page. Dialogue in which every character sounds alike gets boring very quickly. On the other hand, writers who try too hard to differentiate between characters by means of regional accents, speech patterns, or speech impediments all too easily end up with dialogue that sounds artificial.

Even harder, perhaps impossible, to convey on the page is the actual sound of someone’s voice. We end up falling back on adjectives—deep baritone, high tinkly, and the like—or comparisons to the voices of real, named people including actors (a “lazy” technique frowned upon by writing teachers), or to the sounds made by animals or by inanimate objects like fingers on a chalkboard.

So, those are my musings on the subject. I’d love to hear what folks reading this post think about conveying the sound of a character’s voice on the page, as well as who first comes to mind when the question of an immediately recognizable voice is raised. I hope you’ll chime in with a comment.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new omnibus e-book editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.