Mary Elizabeth McGlynn

Mary Elizabeth McGlynn does three jobs, and the one she is most loved for barely shows up in a filmography. Born in Newark in 1966, she works as a voice actress, an ADR director and a singer, and it is the singing that a certain kind of fan will name first: her vocals on the Silent Hill games are, for many players, the emotional centre of those soundtracks.

The acting is a long run of authority figures. She voiced Motoko Kusanagi across the Ghost in the Shell series and directed the English dubs on several entries, and her dubbing work runs deep enough to take in the English adaptation of Cowboy Bebop. In American animation the pattern holds: Governor Pryce in Star Wars Rebels, a bureaucrat whose menace is entirely a matter of tone; Coach Brunt in Carmen Sandiego; Dr Maheswaran in Steven Universe and Steven Universe Future, a mother written as an obstacle and played as somebody convinced she is helping.

The directing deserves as much attention as the performing. ADR direction is the invisible craft of making a translated script fit a mouth that was animated for another language, and doing it without the result sounding translated, and she has spent decades at it. Her Zahra, played at the Critical Role table, carried straight over into The Legend of Vox Machina, which is a tidy demonstration that a voice actor's job is the character rather than the medium.