Michael Winslow

The billing was The Man of 10,000 Sound Effects, and unlike most publicity lines it undersells the act. Winslow does not imitate sounds so much as rebuild them, mouth and throat reproducing the exact attack and decay of a helicopter, a jammed cassette, a machine gun, a dot-matrix printer. It is closer to foley work than to comic impressions, and there has never been anyone else who does it at that level.

Hollywood found exactly one thing to do with it. He is Larvell Jones in all seven Police Academy films, from the 1984 original through to Mission to Moscow in 1994, plus the spin-off series, a part that largely exists so the plot can stop for a noise routine. He is also several of the creatures in Gremlins and the radar technician in Spaceballs, which builds one of its best gags around him. The pattern is consistent: he gets hired for the instrument, not for the character.

That is a real limitation, and the work that followed lives inside it. Cheech and Chong pictures early on, the Sharknado and Lavalantula end of the television movie business later, commercials, and versions of himself in The Great Buck Howard and Killing Hasselhoff. A Spaceballs sequel has him back as the radar technician. Very few performers possess a skill nobody else can do, and fewer still have been offered so little to do with it, which makes the whole filmography faintly frustrating and the man himself a genuine one-off.