This article appeared in the April 71 issue of After Noon TV.
It is accompanied by photos of Bernard Grant (Steve Burke) & his daughter
This article wouldn't be here for your viewing without John. THANKS John!!!
A VOICE THAT GETS AROUND
“Unfortunately, you won’t see Bernard Grant – You’ll see Marcello Mastroianni, or Yves Montand, or Jean Gabin, or Toshiro Mifuni - but the voice you’re hearing will probably be Bernard Grant.”
by Jake Erwin
If you’re a Bernard Grant fan – and many of you obviously are, he was starred on The Guiding Light for 13 years and has now joined One Life to Live – tune in the next foreign film that shows up on your local Late Show, and you can probably catch another side of his work.
Unfortunately, you won’t see Bernard Grant – You’ll see Marcello Mastroianni, or Yves Montand, or Jean Gabin, or Toshiro Mifuni – but the voice you’re hearing will probably be Bernard Grant, and that’s a voice many of you may also remember from hundreds of radio shows and an awful lot of commercials. That’s a voice that gets around.
“It was hard to break into radio as a leading man when I started, so I mostly did character parts, sometimes playing two different people in the same show – you just did one voice high and one low. I learned to do all ages and dialects, and now I dub a movie almost every week; I’ve done hundreds,” he said.
These movies all come from Europe to New York for the English-speaking voices to be added, so it seems only right that Bernard Grant should be working with them, since his parents also came from Europe to New York.
“My father came from Poland,” he said, “literally riding the rails. He was 16 years old and he had 24 cents in his pocket and one pair of pants, traveling steerage. I never knew that until I was in my 20’s, and I was really impressed. He was a furrier, and he seemed the most unlikely guy in the world to have done that. I guess you just never know the kind of bravado your parents can come up with.”
His mother, Minnie (“You just don’t find names like that any more”), made the same trip when she was only 15, the two met and married, and baby Bernard was born October 10th in New York (“Yes, there are a few of us who were actually born here”).
“My mother was a seamstress, and she made all my cloths until I was 8 or 9 years old; I thought that’s what everybody did,” he recalls.
The family fur business never appealed to the young Bernard, mostly because he knew from the start that he wanted to act.
“I remember the old days at holiday parties when all the kids were trotted out to recite, and we all always recited the same thing – Abu Ben Adam. I knew from my first Abu Ben Adam that I was going to be an actor. I was too shy to go out for the Dramatic Club in high school, but I did act with some church groups, and that’s where I met my oldest friend, Martin Balsam.”
When the fur business fell on hard times Bernard dropped out of college to help support the family, and worked for a while in a worsted mill, where he was encouraged to go into sales. Fortunately, the potential salesman in him lost out to the potential actor, and he took a job as a radio announcer on station WPAT.
After the Army he went back to the announcing job for about a year before he began the career as an actor that has rarely slowed down since.
“This wasn’t the heyday of radio drama,” he said, “but there were plenty of shows around and I was lucky enough to start working quickly. That’s also how I met my wife.”
Bernard’s wife, actress Joyce Gordon, is now one of the best-known names in the commercial field and, in a left-handed way, they “worked together” while he was on Guiding Light – he as Dr. Fletcher on the show, she as the star of two Duncan Hines commercials. He left the show on September 22nd, she was still “on it” with those commercials in December.
“While I was a radio actor there was an area at NBC with a ring of seats and telephones where the actors used to hang out, and I met her there one day after a particularly bad job interview. All the rest of us agreed that the director who had interviewed us was a perfectly rotten guy, and then along came this bouncy young thing saying ‘I’ve just met the most wonderful man!’ Somehow she managed to get something out of him that the rest of us didn’t, so naturally we hated her instantly.”
The hate didn’t last too long – the charm that won over that director won over Bernard Grant, too – and he talks about her today with such pride that a misunderstanding writer once hurt him very badly in a newspaper column.
“I sometimes tend to rhapsodize about my wife because she is one of the very best, and the story made it sound like I was living off her. I was ashamed to face people after that.”
The thought is, of course, absurd; Bernard Grant’s career as both daytime star and movie-voice has been so consistently successful that there is obviously no ego-clash involved – can it be that we’ve all grown so cynical that a man who is proud of his wife’s success is automatically suspect? Women’s Lib take note – I find that writer highly suspect.
“We worked together on radio occasionally, but the truth is that husband-and-wife teams are not necessarily better off; we actually didn’t work well at all,” he admits.
Their careers may not have blended well together, but their lives most certainly did, and that blending has created two children.
“My son Mark is a freshman at the University of Rochester,” he said, “and her writes movie reviews for the campus newspaper. He told me when he started school that he wanted to write about film – he’s not interested in performing – so I took a subscription to the paper. I got very depressed once when I saw an unsigned review of Faces in the paper, because I thought ‘This guy is good, how can my son possibly compete with him?’ Then Mark called to say ‘What did you think of my review of Faces?’ and I was absolutely thrilled to discover that the writer I was so impressed by was my son.”
There also appears to be a musical strain in the family heritage somewhere; Mark is a pianist and studies organ, and his younger sister Melissa (she is in high school and lives at home with Bernard and Joyce) plays the guitar and composes.
“The day Mark was born I was on When A Girl Marries on radio – I did that show for about seven years – and I got a stand-in to play the part for me, so I could rush to the hospital on the other side of town. As it turned out my wife – as usual – was performing beautifully, the birth was a perfect one, and I got back in time to do the show myself.”
Bernard had other long runs on radio in Road of Life, Life Can Be Beautiful (“We used to call it LCBB”) and Hilltop House, while also acting in dozens of nighttime shows and working on Portia Faces Life with Lucille Wall (Lucille March on General Hospital).
As radio began to fade, live television began to appear, and Bernard Grant had no real problem in making the switch (one of his early roles used his radio training fully – he played “a big stupid giant called Herman on a kid’s show called Magic Cottage. That was a lot of fun.”) He worked all the major dramas until live television also began to fade, and the shows all moved to Hollywood.
“That’s when I cast my lot with Guiding Light,” he said. “I had done Date With Life and The Inner Flame on TV and Hilltop House on radio at the same time, but they both went off the same day, and suddenly I had nothing.”
From nothing he went to that 13 years stand on Guiding Light, but when he took the part he didn’t expect it to last 13 days. “I thought it was a temporary thing, but Agnes Nixon was writing it, and apparently she liked me, and when she took over the show I became permanent. I was her offspring, so to speak.”
Mrs. Nixon, who was a notoriously good eye for actors, didn’t forget her “offspring” as she went to create two shows of her own (One Life to Live and All My Children), and when she heard that Bernard Grant had left Guiding Light she was on the phone immediately.
“There was some interest expressed in me by other shows,” he said, “but I really preferred this one. On One Life to Live I play a brusque, dynamic kind of guy – no perfect gentleman he – and it’s an exiting character to work with. Dr. Fletcher – I have his nameplate on my den wall at home – on Light had become very mellow, a bulwark of innocence. I like the change.”
The new company was not made up totally of strangers to Bernard; he’d worked in radio with Nat Polen (“I just read the Antony Ponzini movie script that Nat has been working with, and I was totally absorbed. They’ve got a movie there.”) and director David Pressman has been a friend for 20 years, though they’ve never worked together before.
“David’s wife and I were in the same acting class; so was my wife and Jack Lemmon, Cliff Robertson, Rita Gam and Peggy McCay. It was quite a class.”
Bernard’s heavy schedule on television had kept him away from any big leads in recent foreign films when we met, but he has been a superstar in that area for along time, and he recalls, with a grin, that “I guess I was involved with the first breakthrough in ‘sex films’ – I did the voice for the lead in And God Created Woman With… what was her name?” (We finally realized that it was Brigette Bardot, which reminded him wryly of just how fleeting fame really is. Of course, he never met the lady … that might have made her name a little more memorable.)
Besides providing the voice for every major foreign star, Bernard has also often spoken for American actors: “Sometimes – particularly in the Italian westerns – all the voices are put in after the picture is made, and if the original American isn’t available I do that, too.” (Among others, he’s been Guy Madison, Cameron Mitchell and Bruce Cabot.)
We met at a small apartment in Manhattan that Bernard and Joyce keep for business reasons, since they are in the city so much of the time, but their home is Westchester Country, a commuter area where they have lived for 15 years.
“It’s a great house,” he said, “it was built in 1928 and they just don’t make them like that any more. It’s in the Tudor style, with brown beams; a cozy big house where you can be alone when you have to be. Our housekeeper, Frances Condon, has been with us for 15 years, and she’s a joy. They don’t make women like her any more, either.”
Before Bernard had to dash away for – what else? – another movie-dubbing assignment, he spoke enthusiastically about writer Thomas Berger, whose novel Vital Parts he had just discovered (Dustin Hoffman’s new movie, Little Big Man, is based on a Berger novel). “Time is so important to me that I always feel guilty reading a book if I don’t feel I’m learning something from it. This book is not only very funny, I also feel I can learn a lot from a writer this brilliant.”
Well, knowing Bernard Grant, if he likes the book that much he just might take a crush course in Italian so he can dub the foreign version if it should also become a movie. (But what if his son reviews it and doesn’t like it)