King and Queen Crowned at SAG Awards

Last night, with dazzle and glitz and millions of fans, actors honored their own at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

The winners in the theatrical motion picture category were Helen Mirren in “The Queen” for best female lead actor, Forest Whitaker in “The Last King of Scotland” for best male lead actor, Jennifer Hudson in “Dreamgirls” for best female supporting actor, Eddie Murphy in “Dreamgirls” for best male supporting actor and “Little Miss Sunshine” for best motion picture cast.

And for prime-time TV, the winners were Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons, both in “Elizabeth I,” for best female and male actor in a TV movie or miniseries. Chandra Wilson in “Grey’s Anatomy” won for best female actor in a drama and Hugh Laurie in “House” won for best male actor in a drama. In a comedy series, America Ferrera in “Ugly Betty” won for best female actor and Alec Baldwin in “30 Rock” for best male actor.

“Grey’s Anatomy” won for best ensemble performance in a drama, “The Office” for best ensemble performance in a comedy and, of course, Julie Andrews was honored with the Life Achievement Award.

But there were other winners last night—all of the voice-over performers in the Screen Actors (SAG) who were honored in a special tribute. Actor Kiefer Sutherland described them as the “thousands of [SAG] members who are heard but never seen.”

As the highly respected SAG Awards producer Kathy Connell points out, a voice-over performer in a film or TV show is “the voice you hear at the other end of the phone conversation, or on a walkie-talkie, or on a loudspeaker in the airport. In a crowd scene, if you hear 20 voices screaming, ‘Duck!,’ those will be voice-over performers.” Among their other types of work are ADR (automatic voice replacement) and foreign-language dubbing, not to mention the voices in commercials, animation, video games and other media.

“They work behind the scenes,” Connell adds. “They’re not stars. They work at scale. They don’t get the glamour.”

Two who were interviewed (and seen) in the SAG Awards’ filmed tribute are Denise Lebre and Don Lafontaine. Both are considered among the best in their business.

Lebre, who was born in Mexico, has recorded commercials in Spanish for Wells Fargo, Secret deodorant, Jack-in-the-Box and nearly every advertiser in between. And she’s dubbed into Spanish the voices of Meryl Streep and Daryl Hannah, scores of cartoon characters and actresses on TV shows ranging from “Desperate Housewives” to “Grey’s Anatomy.” She also hosts a Spanish-language radio show of Brazilian music, sponsored by the Brazilian consulate in Los Angeles. “I call myself the voice with 1,000 faces,” she says.

For Lebre, SAG membership makes a world of difference. “When you work through SAG, you’re protected,” she says. “There are rates we know we’ll get paid. We can count on royalties and benefits.”

Perhaps the best known voice-over performer is Don Lafontaine, who’s become famous after appearing in a television commercial for Geico. “It’s changed my career enormously,” he muses. “After 43 years in the business, now I’m known as the Geico guy. I get recognized. People stop me and talk about it.”

One of his specialties is trailers for movies, including “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Beverly Hills Cop” and many more. “Based on the number of contracts signed,” Lafontaine says, “I must be the busiest actor in the history of SAG. I’ve had tens of thousands of SAG contracts. In the past, I’d have eight or more in a day.”

Lafontaine enthusiastically agrees with Lebre on union membership. “There are wonderful health and retirement benefits in SAG,” he notes. “And if you deal with a producer who tries to take advantage of you, the union will protect you. With SAG, there’s a minimum day-player rate. That can be terrific in a field where jobs are rare. You need to make a decent wage, and that’s where SAG comes in.”

Lebre puts it this way: “Only maybe 1 percent of SAG members are celebrities. The rest of us are mainly working class.” So it made perfect sense for the SAG Awards to pay tribute to all the voice-over performers whose work in their industry is vital and whom almost no one ever knows.

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