Voice Activated

Angela Henry, Ed.M.’83, was destined to do something big with her voice. Growing up, people told her they loved hearing her read out loud. Her parents even relied on it: As the family camped its way across the United States, Henry would read to her siblings to pass the time. She says that J.R.R. Tolkien novels may have prevented fratricide in the back seat. Now a voice and screen actor, Henry talked to Ed. about her career, Harvard, and off-key jingles.

How did you get started with voice work?
My start was in third grade. You know how the teacher has each student read a sentence aloud from the book of the week? My teacher would let me read paragraphs. My seventh-grade English teacher told me that she could listen to me read the phone book.

As a kid, you were fascinated by ads and commercials. Did any stand out?
The Oscar Mayer bologna commercial was one of my favorites. I loved the song, the kids, and the way they ended the jingle just a little off-key. I was a child musician and knew how hard it was to do that deliberately.

What was your first gig?
Reading law text into a tape recorder for two blind law students was my first paid gig. It helped pay my college tuition. They told me I was the only reader who didn’t put them to sleep.

What was the funniest thing you’ve ever narrated?
There’s a character in The Other Side of Everything who is self-centered, self-promoting, un-ashamedly bombastic, and the author often has him speaking with nonstop alliteration. It was hilarious. I had to do multiple takes before I could record with-out bursting out laughing.

Your first audiobook was Condoleezza Rice’s Democracy: The Long Road To Freedom. How did that happen?
The producer at Hachette Audio asked a friend, who is a casting director, if she had any actors in her stable who could narrate well. What I do is voice acting, not just reading. A lot of great actors cannot narrate well. The casting agent, who has cast me in movies, pulled up my website on her phone right then and there. The producer listened to my voice and said, “That’s the one.”

You actually did research for this part?
They gave me complete artistic freedom. I chose the voices and interpreted the emotions, but there’s nothing worse than listening to an audiobook and hearing something mispronounced because the narrator didn’t do her homework. I spent hours re-searching pronunciations. There were names of people and places in her stories from around the world. Do you say, “MOSS-koh” or “MOSS-kow”? Hachette says, “MOSS-koh.”

How did you become the voice of novelist Toni Morrison in the 2012 short film Shokran, Toni?
I had known the writer/producer, Nahid Toubia, from the 1980s and lost touch. A mutual friend reconnected us. I am a big fan of Toni Morrison, so it was an honor to narrate her work in the film.

You studied early child-hood at Tufts and then the Ed School. What impact has this had your work now?
I have had the good fortune to have several wonderful careers, including in education, but even now I use what I learned in college and graduate school. Understanding how personalities are formed, how people learn, the influence of the family, and interpersonal dynamics in general are a constant. I am a quick study of the people I work with in voice acting — the casting director, the client, the radio DJ — and that can help me land the gig.

Is there a difference between voice-over and narration?
There are lots of debates about that! Mostly we think of voice-over in commercials, where you don’t see the person who is speaking and what is being said is a kind of pronouncement: You have this issue, we have this product, go out and buy it. Narration, on the other hand, is telling a story of some kind. I love them both.

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Ed. Extra:

Angela Henry’s re-write as a kid of the Oscar Meyer jingle:

My pajamas have a nickname, 

it’s P –A – J – A – M.

And when it’s time to go to bed

I jump right into them.

They keep my cozy – nice and warm

but I outgrew them – they got to-o-o-rn

but Mommy made me new pajam’s

and this pair has both feet and hands!