Rich Little

Richard Caruthers Little (born November 26, 1938) is a Canadian-American comedian, impressionist and voice actor. Sometimes known as the "Man of a Thousand Voices", Little has recorded nine comedy albums and made numerous television appearances, including three HBO specials.

Early life Little was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the middle of three sons, older brother Fred and younger brother Chris. His father, Lawrence Peniston Little, was a surgeon who served as a lieutenant commander in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War II and then worked for the Department of Veterans' Affairs until his death in 1959.

He attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute. In his early teens, he formed a partnership with Geoff Scott, another budding impressionist (and future elected politician), concentrating on reproducing the voices of Canadian politicians such as Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and Ottawa mayor Charlotte Whitton.

Career Early career in Canada Starting when he was 11, Little acted in two documentary movies for Crawley Films of Ottawa.

Little and Scott's comedy team performed at various local events and venues. Still in their teens, they developed a 10-minute act that they performed at Shriners' conventions and Knights of Columbus meetings.

By the 1960s, Little was taking his act to Toronto, where he performed at coffee houses, nightclubs, and other venues.

Little's American career was helped by Peppiatt and Aylesworth, a Canadian writing team who had moved to Hollywood and worked on various specials and variety series, including The Judy Garland Show. Familiar with Little's work in Canada, Peppiatt had worked on The Jackie Rae Show, on which Little made a television appearance at 17, and the team had written Little's original Canadian nightclub act and would write much of his American material in the 1960s. They played a recording of Little for Garland and the show's musical director, Mel Tormé, and encouraged her to audition him. Tormé had met Little when they both performed on an episode of Parade, a CBC Television variety show in Toronto, and the two bonded over their interest in old films. In 1972, he portrayed Richard Nixon with the voice and mannerisms of Oliver Hardy in Another Nice Mess. Little later appeared as Nixon on the soap opera Santa Barbara, in a 1991 fantasy sequence regarding Gina's ideal sperm donor. In 1992, he voiced Nixon in the animated film Bébé's Kids.

In 2020, Little developed Trial on the Potomac: The Impeachment of Richard Nixon, a play based on the 2015 book The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down by Geoff Shepard, alleging a conspiracy to remove Nixon from office. Little performed the show Off Broadway for a five-week run in 2021.

1970s Little appeared in the feature film The Phynx (1970). Jack Benny, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart and Kirk Douglas.

The Rich Little Show (1975–1976) on NBC and The New You Asked for It (1981) were attempts to present Little in his own persona, away from his gallery of characterizations. Little also appeared on a second-season episode of The Muppet Show.

The one-man show Rich Little's Christmas Carol was his first HBO special, produced by and originally aired on CBC Television in December 1978 and airing on HBO in 1979. Little portrayed famous comedians in established roles (W. C. Fields as Ebenezer Scrooge, Paul Lynde as Bob Cratchit, et al.). The special won an International Emmy Award and a Rose d'Or award.

1980s In 1981, Little appeared in a comedy LP called The First Family Rides Again, which was the fourth and final of the First Family comedy LPs originally created by Bob Booker David Arvedon, and Earle Doud. Little starred along with Melanie Chartoff, Michael Richards, Shelley Hack, Jenilee Harrison, Earle Doud, and Vaughn Meader, making light of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's first few months in the White House.

Little hosted a syndicated revival of the human interest show, You Asked For It from 1981 to 1982.

Outside a comedic context, Little was also employed as a voice double when actors were unable to complete dialogue because of illness. He imitated David Niven for the actor's appearances in Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), provided the voice of James Cagney in the television film Terrible Joe Moran (1984) after Cagney had suffered a stroke, and supplied an uncredited voice dub for Gene Kelly in the 1991 television special Christmas at the Movies after Kelly had lost his voice.

He also lent his voice to the narration of three specials that were the forerunners for the animated series The Raccoons: The Christmas Raccoons (1980), The Raccoons on Ice (1981), and The Raccoons and the Lost Star (1983). His brother, Fred Little, voiced the character Cedric Sneer.

In 1987, during the We the People 200: The Constitutional Gala television special, Little personified various historical figures, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Edward R. Murrow, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Little's performance was described as eclectic, impersonating Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln and doing Winston Churchill giving a rousing speech. That same year, he provided the voice of Crispy, the mascot of Post's Crispy Critters cereal.

The Tonight Show Little was a frequent guest on variety and talk shows in the 1960s and 1970s, and had an unofficial monthly slot on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for several years, and also guest hosted the program about a dozen times. Little had been doing the impression since the early 1970s, though, a decade prior to his bookings on the show coming to an end, including performing the impression to the Tonight Show host's face when Carson was the guest of honor at The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of Johnny Carson in 1973. In response to Little's claims, Fred DeCordova, Carson's producer, said they just were not interested in hiring him anymore due to his lack of new impressions.

Las Vegas career Little has been appearing in Las Vegas since the mid-1960s, when he had dates at the Golden Nugget

With opportunities for him to work in television and film in decline, and his television work almost completely drying up by the mid-1980s, the focus of Little's career shifted from Hollywood to Las Vegas. After the death of Stewart in the late 1990s, Rich recorded the crosswalk messages for intersections in Stewart's hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania, using his imitation of the star's voice.

From 2015 until 2024, Little was a regular performer at the Laugh Factory in the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas. The Tropicana closed in April 2024 and was demolished that October to make way for a new stadium for the Athletics. Little said that he intended to return to the Laugh Factory once the club found a new location on the Las Vegas Strip.

Little performed at the Tuscany Suites and Casino's Copa Room from September 2025 until 2026, presenting his one-hour show three nights a week. On April 6, 2026, he began a residency at the new Laugh Factory, which had opened at the Horseshoe Las Vegas, performing three evenings a week.

Critical assessments of Little's stage act have sometimes distinguished between his technical ability as an impressionist and the quality of his material. Reviewing a 1990 performance, Jess Bravin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Little relied on mimicry as an attraction in itself rather than using it to achieve a larger comic purpose. Bravin criticized the show's extended sketches, limited topicality and uneven resemblance of some impressions to their subjects, although he considered Little more effective when the impressions were presented briefly.

2007 White House Correspondent's Association dinner Little was the featured entertainer at the 2007 White House Correspondents' Association dinner. His selection was interpreted by some commentators as a deliberately uncontroversial response to Stephen Colbert's pointed performance at the previous year's dinner. Before the event, The Washington Post characterized Little's comedy as non-topical and observed that many of his best-known impressions were of performers and political figures who had died or were no longer prominent. Comedian Lewis Black was quoted criticizing the choice of Little calling his act dated and politically harmless.

Although President George W. Bush was reported to have enjoyed the performance, reviewers criticized Little's reliance on older material and impressions of deceased figures. Time later described the routine as a recycling of his established Johnny Carson and presidential impressions and included it among performances that had “bombed” at the annual dinner.

Other appearances since 2000 Little appeared as a guest star in Futurama season two episode "Raging Bender" and the film Futurama: Bender's Game, playing his own celebrity head, impersonating Howard Cosell.

In 2017, Little released his memoir, Little by Little: People I Have Known and Been. In 2021, CBS News Sunday Morning profiled Little; during the interview, he stated he believed it was the first time he had been on network television in 30 years, and hoped it would "go over well!"

In 2018, he appeared as himself in the documentary They'll Love Me When I'm Dead about Orson Welles' final film The Other Side of the Wind. Little was in the original 1974 cast but left for other commitments and his scenes were reshot with Peter Bogdanovich playing the part. Bogdanovich completed directing the film in 2018 after Welles died in 1985. Little is credited as a party guest in The Other Side of the Wind.

Little was a frequent guest on Huckabee, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's talk show on the Trinity Broadcast Network, having appeared more often than any other guest. His last appearance was on the series finale, January 11, 2025.

Honours Little was named "Comedy Star of the Year" by the American Guild of Variety Artists in 1974. He was inducted into the Canadian Comedy Hall of Fame in 2001.

Little was engaged to magician Melinda Saxe, but she broke-off the three-year relationship in 1991, saying she had discovered he had secretly videotaped them having sex in 1988. Saxe sued Little for defamation, invasion of privacy, and inflicting emotional distress, claiming he had joked about their relationship on stage. Little claimed the videotaping was consensual. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court.

He married comedian and impressionist Jeannette Markey in 1994; they divorced in 1997. He was married to Marie Marotta from 2003 until her death in 2010 of a deliberate overdose of sleeping pills after years of suffering from migraines and chronic pain. He married his fourth wife, Catherine Brown, a former reality show contestant, in a private ceremony in 2012; they divorced in October of that year.

In 2010, Little became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Politically, he is a conservative and has described himself as "basically a Republican", though his act has generally been non-partisan. In 2021, he asserted to the Daily Beast his belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 United States presidential election.

Little's older brother, Fred, was a social worker and voice actor who was the original voice of Cederic Sneer in The Raccoons. Fred Little also performed in smaller venues as an impressionist in his own right and appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on January 25, 1979, and an episode of An Evening at the Improv in 1990, both times with Rich Little hosting. Younger brother Chris was a commercial artist who designed the covers of Little's albums.