Patricia Parris
Patricia Parris is an actor, born 1950.
Patricia Parris was born in Ohio in 1950 and became one of the voices American children heard constantly through the 1980s without ever learning her name. She worked for effectively every animation house operating at the time: Hanna-Barbera, Disney, Ruby-Spears, DIC, Sunbow, Universal, the Jim Henson Company.
The Disney work is where she is most audible. She was Kanga in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, a harder job than it sounds, because Kanga has to be maternal without being soft and calm without being dull. She was Daisy Duck playing Belle in Mickey's Christmas Carol, Aquarianne in Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Lilly in Dumbo's Circus and Skittles in DuckTales, with Pammy Panda in Shirt Tales and a voice in The Littles elsewhere on the schedule.
Her career also ran through the channels that leave no credit at all: read-along story records, radio, video games, theme park attractions. A generation of children learned what a story sounds like from records narrated by performers like her and could not name a single one of them. Voice work of that era was piecework, unglamorous and relentless, and the people who were good at it were extremely good at a skill nobody was watching.
Movies (3)
TV (6)
Where to start with Patricia Parris
Put on The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh first. It is both the best show she worked on and the role that asks most of her, and it is unusually gentle television, made on the assumption that small children deserve care rather than noise.
Mickey's Christmas Carol is the highest-craft item on the list, a short film with the whole studio behind it, and Winnie the Pooh & Christmas Too is its seasonal companion.
Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears is where the late-1980s Disney television unit found its ambition and DuckTales is where it found its audience. She is in the background of both, which is the honest description of most voice careers. Shirt Tales and Dumbo's Circus are for the specifically nostalgic, and Rover Dangerfield is the strangest thing here by a distance.