Don Adams
Don Adams is an actor, born 1923.
Everything Don Adams did on screen ran through his voice: clipped, nasal, permanently self-satisfied, delivering total nonsense with the timing of a man reading out a verdict. He was born Donald James Yarmy in New York in 1923, was working on American variety television by the 1950s, and turned that single instrument into five decades of work.
Get Smart made him. As Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, he played incompetence as unshakeable confidence, and it won him three consecutive Emmy Awards between 1967 and 1969. He also directed and wrote for the series, which is the part usually left out of the summary. The character never really released him: he came back to it in the 1980 film The Nude Bomb, and every role afterwards was audibly a relative of it.
Animation is where the voice paid its longest dividend. He was the title character in Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales in the 1960s and Inspector Gadget from 1983, carrying the latter through the revivals of the 1990s. The joke was the same joke, and it landed on a second generation of children with no idea they were listening to a 1960s sitcom star.
In the 1999 live-action Inspector Gadget he was not Gadget at all; he voiced Brain instead, which is a fair emblem of a late career spent orbiting one enormous early success. He died in 2005.
Movies (4)
TV (11)
Where to start with Don Adams
Get Smart is the whole case for him, and the early seasons are the ones to try: the spy parody was topical enough in 1965 to have real targets, and Adams plays Smart with such total absence of doubt that the jokes still work sixty years on. The shoe phone and the Cone of Silence are the famous bits, but the delivery is the actual craft.
Inspector Gadget comes next if you want the same instrument aimed at children. It holds up better than most Saturday-morning animation of its decade, largely because the lead performance is doing real comic work rather than filling airtime.
Approach the rest with lowered expectations. The Nude Bomb recovers the character without the show's comic timing, Inspector Gadget hands him a supporting voice in a live-action adaptation, and Pepper Ann and Back to the Beach are cameos for people who enjoy recognising a voice.