Kevin Conroy, Who Gave Batman a Definitive Voice in Animated Projects, Dead at 66
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Kevin Conroy, the voice actor best known for portraying Batman in an array of animated movies, television shows, and video games over three decades, has died. He was 66.
“It is with profound sadness that I send this to you today: Kevin Conroy, the quintessential voice of Batman, and a dear friend to so many of us, has passed away,” Conroy’s rep confirmed to Rolling Stone.
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Conroy voice starred in Batman: The Animated Series for four years from 1992-1996 and continued on with the role in nearly 60 different projects.
Mark Hamill, who played Conroy’s onscreen rival the Joker, remembered the actor as one of his “favorite people on the planet.”
“Kevin was perfection,” recalled Hamill. “He was one of my favorite people on the planet, and I loved him like a brother. He truly cared for the people around him – his decency shone through everything he did. Every time I saw him or spoke with him, my spirits were elevated.”
“Kevin was far more than an actor whom I had the pleasure of casting and directing – he was a dear friend for 30+ years whose kindness and generous spirit knew no boundaries,” added casting and dialogue director Andrea Romano “Kevin’s warm heart, delightfully deep laugh and pure love of life will be with me forever.”
While the Dark Knight came to dominate Conroy’s professional career, he didn’t necessarily intend such a role to define his career. Born in 1955 and raised largely in Connecticut in a strict Irish-Catholic family, comic books were never his thing. But as a middle school outcast, he found solace in acting and continued to pursue it, ultimately earning a place — and several lead roles — in his high school’s celebrated acting troupe. Conroy was so accomplished he not only graduated high school early but earned a scholarship to Juilliard, where he enrolled when he was just 17.
After graduating from Juilliard, Conroy spent the late Seventies with the touring troupe the Acting Company while also performing in a handful of Broadway plays. But as he noted in a 2009 interview, he soon realized that television would be key to making a living as an actor. He parlayed work on soap operas to parts in primetime. During the Eighties, he scored guest spots on everything from Matlock to Cheers and held recurring parts on Dynasty and Tour of Duty.
Then in the early Nineties, Conroy was asked to audition for Batman: The Animated Series, which arrived in the wake of Tim Buton’s two successful Batman flicks in 1989 and 1992. Conroy had done some commercial voiceover work but never an animated series; more so, his only conception of Batman/Bruce Wayne was pegged to the 1960s Adam West series, which was completely different from the noir-tinged show the creators of the animated show were trying to develop.
In various tellings of the story, Conroy has described himself as both intrigued by the darker elements of the Batman story and totally bemused by the character. As he told Esquire in 2012, “As soon as [the producers] described his schizophrenic lifestyle, it bugged me. I thought, Wait a minute, he is the Bill Gates of Gotham. He is the most eligible bachelor. Everyone knows who he is. And he puts on a cape, and no one recognizes him? Come on.”
What helped Conroy earn the role — and what later made his portrayal so definitive — was the rather simple choice to use different voices for Batman and Bruce Wayne. At first, his Bruce Wayne was a little too wry and charming, and the producers asked him to go back and re-record a couple of episodes so there wouldn’t be such a significant gap with his much grittier Batman voice. But as he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, “They liked my idea of two voices; they just wanted it to be more subtle.”
Batman: The Animated Series was a critical hit and went on to win three Daytime Emmy Awards, as well as an impressive Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program in 1993. Batman: The Animated Series technically only ran for two seasons between 1992 and 1995, though produced a whopping 85 episodes during that span. (A third season technically aired a few years later on a different network, under the name The New Batman Adventures, and with a slightly different aesthetic look to match an accompanying Superman series.)
Voicing Batman in TV shows, movies, and video games wasn’t the only job Conroy held for the next 30 years, but it was certainly his most consistent and prominent one. At one point, he even spoofed himself in Kevin Smith’s 2016 comedy, Yoga Hosers, appearing as “Canadian Bat, Man!”
Earlier this year, Conroy even ventured into Batman’s original medium, comics, penning an autobiographical issue, Finding Batman, for DC Pride 2022. In the issue, Conroy opened up about his difficult childhood and experiences as a gay man, both growing up in an extremely religious household and then navigating an industry that was often still hostile to homosexuality. He also wrote about how these experiences actually perfectly prepared him for the role that would define his career.
In the final panel of the comic, Conroy wrote, “My heart pulsed, I felt my face flush, my breath grew deeper, I began to speak and a voice I didn’t recognize came out. It was a throaty husky rumbling sound that shook my body. It seemed to roar from 30 years of frustration, confusion, denial, love, yearning… Yes, I can relate. Yes, this is terrain I know well. I felt Batman rising from deep within.”
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