If I had planned to be a singer, I would have got trained. In fact, I was more into theatre and plays while growing up.
The only vocal training I had was playing with a tape recorder as a kid, and you know, doing the beginning of the 'Lone Ranger' show, with a hearty hi-o silver, and just having fun, never really thinking I would be an announcer.
I would love to play a British character one day. My accent wavers between Scottish and Irish very easily, though.
I made quite a lot of money in commercials and I decided when I got out of school to take singing lessons so I could get into singing commercials, too.
I started singing when I was four years old; that was the first time I took a voice lesson.
At the age of 11 is when I took my love & interest for singing a bit more serious.
I often have scripts sent to me with allegedly Scottish characters where I end up telling them, 'You're going to have to rethink this whole thing!'
I've played American characters so many times now, it's so natural to me. But when I play American, I stay in the American accent from the minute I get the job till the minute I wrap.
When I was about forty-three years of age, I had a private secretary with a beautiful baritone voice. I told him I would give anything in the world if I could only carry a tune. He laughed and said, 'Anybody who has a voice and perseverance can sing.'
I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.
I often find during a day of shooting I will speak in an American accent all day long when I'm doing dialogue. At the end of the day, it often takes an effort when I'm talking to my fiancee to bring my English back just because you're so used to speaking that way.
I was like Gene Kelly, it was called singing in the rain. No seriously, I wasn't really born with a singing voice, but my friends Joe and John taught me how to sing.
In Indian cinema there are no professional voice trainers.
When I had my first voice lesson I was 15 years old. And I had a really good teacher. This is what made all the difference. A good teacher will teach you the technique, but also how to listen to your voice.
Every time a director calls me and says, 'If you practice a lot in two months, can you be an American?' And I always tell them, 'Well, maybe but I'm French. So it's going to be hard to be someone else.'
I've always been interested in singing, and I've always been singing and dancing since I was little.
I have a dialogue coach who helps me out with some of the more tricky Chicago vowel sounds.
All of my experiences as a singer will be of good use long into the future, when I get old enough to finally train others.
I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head.
When I first tried the American accent, for a moment I thought I could never be an actor because I just could not do it. But then I thought, 'Okay, it'll just be something that I work at until I get it.'
I wanted to be Whitney Houston at first, and when I started taking voice lessons, my voice teacher kind of geared me more towards opera.
When I was very young, I started trying to sing like the great tenor Mario Lanza; my family used to play his records. We all learn best by imitating others.
I never took any kind of vocal lessons or teachings of how to - I never even took piano lessons. And a voice just came to me and said, go play the piano in the church.
When I got back from London, I started with a new voice teacher in the experimental wing, who trained me to have my own artistry as opposed to forcing a technique upon me.
I always wanted to sing. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to make the singing thing happen.
