For more than sixty years, actor George S. Irving has been appearing in a steady stream of plays and musicals all over the nation, many of them on Broadway. He appeared in the original productions of Oklahoma! and Call Me Madam, won a Tony award for his performance in Irene, and may well have the longest list of credits of anyone currently plying the trade. He recently completed a stint in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of Camelot, in which he played both Merlin and Pellinore…and the man is over eighty. That takes a lot of energy, and he seems to have a bottomless supply of it.
He is about to be saluted by the Musicals Tonight! group in New York, and I wish I could be there, if only to make certain that his extensive career on stage does not completely overshadow another area of work in which he has distinguished himself. For many years, Mr. Irving has been one of the most prominent voiceover artists on that coast, heard in hundreds of commercials and a pretty high percentage of all animated cartoons that have recorded their voice tracks in Manhattan. In the sixties, he was heard on all of those Total Television shows — King Leonardo, Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, and so forth. (He was the narrator on Underdog.) He gave an outstanding performance as the Heat Miser in the special, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and was heard on many other Rankin-Bass productions. I never met the man but have admired his work from afar. Here's a link to an interview with him from a few years back. Nice to see he mentioned Underdog…