Rick May

Richard James May (September 21, 1940 – April 5, 2020) was a Canadian-American actor, theatrical performer, director, and teacher. He was raised in Washington and Canada. May attended Roosevelt High School in Seattle and St. Olaf College (class of 1962) in Northfield, Minnesota. It was at Roosevelt High School in 1957 that he began his acting career, performing at a Meet-The-Teacher event at the school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1960.

Career May served in the U.S. military and was stationed in Japan, where he coordinated USO shows in Tokyo. May returned to the Seattle area to serve as the director of the Renton Civic Theatre and Civic Light Opera in Renton, Washington. He retired from the Renton Civic Theatre in 2002 to begin his own theater company in Kirkland, Washington, and become a full-time actor.

May began voice acting in video games in the late 1990s, including roles as Peppy Hare and Andross in Star Fox 64; various campaign characters, including Genghis Khan in Age of Empires II and the Soldier in Team Fortress 2. The last two episodes of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to feature May were recorded in late 2019, and were first broadcast in May 2020. May played the role of Inspector Lestrade longer than any other actor in the history of broadcasting. He was inurned in the columbarium at Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent on June 12, 2020.

On May 1, 2020, Valve released an update to Team Fortress 2 adding a tribute to May's voice work as the Soldier in the form of a new main menu theme titled "Saluting The Fallen", a rendition of "Taps", and locking the character image in the main menu to Soldier. The update also added statues of the Soldier saluting to most of the official in-game maps. These statues all featured a commemorative plaque dedicated to May, and remained in maps until June 1. The statues reappear annually, between every 12th to 14th of April , on the anniversary of May's death. On August 21, 2020, a permanent tribute memorial was placed, in the form of a Soldier statue and heads on the fence on the map "Granary", which is the setting of the Team Fortress 2 video "Meet the Soldier".

Many players in the community paid tribute to May's death in-game, where taunts and voice lines were played commemorating him. On most servers, a truce was called for both sides to pay tribute to the actor, and 21-gun salutes were fired on the map 2Fort. Additionally, numerous animated shorts in Source Filmmaker were created and uploaded by the Team Fortress 2 community in honor of May. On December 20, 2024, Valve released the final Team Fortress 2 comic dedicated to May.

Filmography Film

Video games His voice-overs include:

Theater May performed in numerous roles throughout his theatrical career, including:

Brutus (in Julius Caesar) Benjamin Franklin (in 1776) Tevye (in Fiddler on the Roof) Willy Loman (in Death of a Salesman) Alfred Doolittle (in Pygmalion) Theodore Roosevelt (in Bully!) Richard Huckle (in The Pillow Man) King Henry II (in The Lion in Winter) Inspector Lestrade (on radio in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)