Career
Jay appeared on-screen in several films and on television, including Love and Death, Twins, Night Court, The Golden Girls and Eerie, Indiana. He also developed a career in the theatre, in plays such as The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, and The Merchant of Venice. Jay's other non-animation roles included Paracelsus on the 1987 CBS series Beauty and the Beast; Minister Campio on Star Trek: The Next Generation; and Lex Luthor's villainous aide-de-camp Nigel St. John in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
He was also well known for his role as the voice of the virus Megabyte in the animated series ReBoot, and for his voice work as Judge Claude Frollo in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in the Walt Disney World version of the nighttime light and fireworks show Fantasmic!. He also voiced Monsieur D'Arque, the amoral asylum superintendent, in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Jay also in 1995-96 had a animation voice as he voiced a vile alien warlord named Lord Dregg, the new main villain of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series in the show's last two seasons.
He is also well-known among Legacy of Kain fans for his voicing of the original Mortanius and of the Elder God, alongside several other minor characters. He was also the successor of George Sanders in the role of Shere Khan the tiger as he voiced the character in Tale Spin and reprised his role of the character for fifteen years after it ended until his death. The Jungle Book 2 was his final reprisal of the role.
Jay was a devotee of classic Broadway, and made several recordings and performances of old-time Broadway lyrics, in spoken-word form. A CD of these readings, Speaking of Broadway, was released in 2005; a version recorded years earlier of the same collection was titled Poets on Broadway, as is his website. It features Jay reciting lyrics written by the likes of Noël Coward, Ira Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein and was composed entirely by him, according to the CD liner notes.
Read more about this topic: Tony Jay
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)