Corey Burton

Listen to Ziro the Hutt in Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) and you hear a lisping drawl arrive fully formed, every vowel placed, a character sketched in a sentence. Then listen to what the film gives him to do, which is stand in a hole in the plot and keep it from showing. That is Corey Burton's career in one part. The voice is always finished. The role is often not.

His real specialism is impersonation, and he came to it early: a Disney filmstrip in 1972, aged 17, doing Hans Conried under another name, then four years of radio acting under Daws Butler. What that training produced is a man who can be hired to sound like an actor who is dead or unavailable and pass. He does Paul Frees for the Ghost Host, and when Christopher Lee stopped voicing Count Dooku he took the part over and nobody noticed the seam. Lee is Dooku in the 2008 film; Burton is Dooku in the series that followed, which tells you how the studio saw him.

The rest of the ledger is long and mostly in the margins. The Transformers (1984) gave him Shockwave, a flat, mechanical menace he has been asked to reproduce in some form ever since, at Warner under Andrea Romano as Brainiac and elsewhere as Dooku. Disney keeps him on retainer for Ludwig Von Drake, Dale the chipmunk, Captain Hook and the How-to Narrator. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) is the nearest he has come to a proper ensemble part, as the digging enthusiast Mole, and he has called it a highlight himself.

What works is the cold. Aristocrats and machines suit him because they do not need warmth, and Burton's precision reads as contempt without his having to push it. What works less is anything that asks the voice to carry a person rather than a type. One or two critics took Ziro as camp; we listened for the character behind the drawl and found nobody there after the first scene, and the film's 44 is partly that: a cast of voices doing turns in the absence of a script. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) he is a Brutish Guard and additional voices, and we could not have told you which, which is rather the job.

He has described himself as a veteran day player, and it is not modesty; it is an accurate account of the work. The best of it is the kind you are not supposed to hear. If you want to catch him at it, wait for a franchise to lose an actor and listen closely to whoever turns up next.