Short David Ogden Stiers Interview

From TheNewsJournal online

His career has become rather animated these days. But what was most memorable about interviewing the man who voiced Dr. Jumba Jookiba in the 2002 film "Lilo & Stitch" was his low-key introduction.

"Hi, how are you. I'm David Stiers," said the plainspoken Midwesterner with the professorially large cranium.

To fans of the TV series "MASH" and in the innumerable small movie roles, he was always David Ogden Stiers, so formal, so patrician. He occupies the lofty, and unseen, position of Narrator in the film opening today, "Pooh's Heffalump Movie."

In person, he's sweet and ingratiating, a good listener who asks as many questions of me as I do of him. And it's clearly no act.

This Everyman, who nonetheless is a classical music fanatic who often takes the podium to conduct symphony orchestras, is a vocal chameleon who's not seen but heard most of the time.

Doing voices, he says, is great fun, but real work in which one learns "a whole new form of acting, the way in which emotion is wrapped around the words."