Robert Easton

Robert Easton (born Robert Easton Burke; November 23, 1930 – December 16, 2011) was an American actor whose career spanned more than 60 years. His mastery of English dialect earned him the epithet "The Man of a Thousand Voices". For decades, he was a leading Hollywood dialogue or accent coach.

Early life Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1930, Robert was the only child of Mary Easton (née Kloes) and John Edward Burke. He moved to Texas at the age of seven with his mother, a former actress, following his parents' divorce. Resettling in the new cultural environment of San Antonio, young Robert took immediate notice of the style of speaking in the city, and he soon became interested in the variety of dialects spoken elsewhere in Texas and in the surrounding region. Struggling with a severe stuttering problem throughout his childhood also made Robert keenly aware of the "minutiae of speech" and the mechanics of pronunciation. He toured the country in 1945 with the cast of other Quiz Kids "child prodigies", and those performances led to other opportunities on radio, such as his role as Magnus Proudfoot on the early radio version of Gunsmoke.

Films By 1949, Easton began working in Hollywood films. Easton continued to use his birth surname during the early years of his film career even though the majority of his roles between 1949 and 1951 remained uncredited on screen. His first onscreen credit—still presented as Robert Easton Burke—was for his role as a soldier in the 1951 MGM production of the Civil War classic The Red Badge of Courage, directed by John Huston and starring Audie Murphy. After that film, however, he legally changed his surname from Burke to Easton for professional reasons but principally "to distinguish himself from his father."

Television Easton performed on many American television series and made-for-television movies from 1951 to the late 1980s, often portraying in his early roles slow-talking "country bumpkins". Near the end of a comedy sketch on that episode, Easton, who was cast as a hillbilly, is confronted by another irate mountain man, and the two exchange rifle fire.

Upon returning to the United States in late 1964, Easton resumed his acting on American television. In "All-Star Munster", a 1965 episode of The Munsters, he was cast yet again as a dimwitted country character named Moose Mallory, a college basketball star. He appeared as well on ABC's World War II drama Combat!, portraying an ill-fated soldier, Woody Jones, in the 1967 episode "A Little Jazz".

Additionally, Easton performed on Screen Directors Playhouse, Dangerous Assignment, My Little Margie, Adventures of Superman, Annie Oakley, The Bob Cummings Show, Riverboat, The Real McCoys, Rescue 8, Father Knows Best, The Red Skelton Show, Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, The Cara Williams Show, Get Smart, The Doris Day Show, The Mod Squad, Alias Smith and Jones, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Dialect coach While Easton remained busy acting in films and on television series throughout the 1950s, by the early 1960s he had become frustrated playing what he described as "shiftless sharecroppers and half-witted hayseeds".

Easton also took the opportunity while in London to attend University College, where he studied phonetics.

Easton's reputation as a dialect coach extended beyond Hollywood sets and Broadway stages. Over the years, he was also hired by business executives, trial lawyers, religious leaders, university professors, and by others who sought to soften their accents or alter their speech in other ways to improve their communication skills or to increase their self-confidence when making public presentations.

Professional organizations Easton was active in many professional organizations, including the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which as part of its mission to promote "the advancement of the telecommunications arts and sciences" presents the annual Emmy Awards for professional excellence in television programming. For seven years, during the 1990s, he was a member of the performers peer group executive committee. He also served as a governor of the performers peer group for the Academy from 2000 to 2003.

Personal life and death In 1961, Easton married June Bettine Grimstead of Grimsby. They remained married for 44 years until her death in 2005. The couple had no children. However, Easton informally adopted a daughter, Heather, after Grimstead's death. The library finally became so large that it outgrew the space available in his 24-room home in Pasadena. He and his wife found a home in Toluca Lake in Los Angeles, California, with a tennis court, removed the court, and replaced it with a two-story structure to house the collection. Four years after Easton's death, his substantial personal library was sold in two installments – in the summer and fall of 2015 – by Addison & Sarova Auctioneers of Macon, Georgia. Horrorween (2011) as Neighbor