Word: swiftness
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...pleaded a producer of TV commercials, asking Actor-Announcer Allen Swift to hurry to a recording session. All sorts of people had collected to praise Chesterfield cigarettes, but no one present had sufficient talent to deliver a certain vital line. Swift hurried the five blocks between his Manhattan office and the recording studio, cleared his throat and said...
...Allen Swift, 38, known as the man of 1,000 voices, is the nation's most successful practitioner of the peculiar art of imitation. Thanks largely to endless repeats that bring him in continuing fees, known in the trade as "residuals," he makes about $300,000 a year. He can imitate anything from the cry of a loon to the whining drawl of a mountaineer, run effortlessly through all the categories of voice quality-rasp, strain, fog, nasal, sinus. He can shift ground from tight-lipped British to loose-lipped Brooklynese to American rural, and run analytically through...
Since then he has done 10,000 commercials, talking as everything from a spark plug to a cereal. He is the entire cast of Tom and Jerry cartoons. He was Captain Swift on TV's Popeye show. During the TV run of the Howdy Doody show, he contributed 50 different characters. For Darryl Zanuck's forthcoming The Longest Day, Swift supplied the sheared-cornflower accents of Dwight David Eisenhower. He is the man who says, "I'm a Newport smoker forever"; who tells viewers to use one dab of Brylcreem, not two; who introduced the Chinese baby...
...Bread Alone. Yet Swift is not willing to live by bread alone (not even Tip-Top, Braun, Stroehmann or Taystee -all Swift clients). Above all, he considers himself an actor, and he has forsaken thousands in commercials to appear for $45 a week in off-Broadway's adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He does three roles, and since he is ordinary looking, few in the audience are aware that the same actor is Father Dolan, an old Franciscan monk, and the president of the university. Offstage, when Swift is not changing his makeup...
Raging Nor'easter. At home in Sydney Harbor, Gretel already had shown herself swift and maneuverable in medium winds...