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Brad Lavelle
Voiceover artist and actor Brad Lavelle, who has died suddenly aged 48, was born in Toronto. He came to England in 1978 and studied drama at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. In an Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night's Dream he met his wife, actor Meg Davies, who played Titania while Brad was one of Oberon's fairies.
For more than 25 years, he was a successful voiceover artist in the UK and America. He was the voice of Pepsi Slam, Domino's Pizza, and - unforgettably - for Chrysler. He worked in feature films including Alien Autopsy and Judge Dredd, many TV series, radio comedy and drama, voiced trailers for films as varied as Borat and Happy Feet, and he especially enjoyed working in computer games and animation.
He loved technology, and the fact that his own industry was so reliant on the medium as well as the message. He was able to work down the line across the world, while being well respected in London studios for his professionalism and humour - memorably in Christmas 2005, walking the streets of Soho from one studio to another, attending every recording in full Santa regalia.
As an actor, he was in a West End production of The Little Foxes with Elizabeth Taylor, and played Captain Kirk in an acclaimed stage production of Star Trek, his Shatner-pause an integral part of the show.
Brad and Meg moved to Mendham in Norfolk in 1994, where they were embraced by the local community - and embraced them back twofold.
Brad's website offers generous and wide-ranging advice to new performers. In his Voiceover 101, with a humility not always evident in his profession, he offers an honest assessment of what it is to be heard but not seen: "I can't stress enough that what we do as voice actors is, in the whole, relatively meaningless to the world ... the best we can ever hope to achieve is informing or entertaining a public that probably won't even recognise our existence."
To those of us who were fortunate to recognise his existence, Brad was a great entertainer, an enthusiastic cook, and with Meg, gave the best parties, made the most potent cocktails, and was, above all, a loyal and wonderful friend. He was a huge character, a man of great generosity and fun. He is survived by Meg, his father and his sister.
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